


Decimated

by Fluterbev, Panik



Category: The Sentinel
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Angst, Government Conspiracy, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Brainwashing, Kidnapping, M/M, Partner Betrayal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-17
Updated: 2013-11-17
Packaged: 2018-01-01 20:31:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 41,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1048271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fluterbev/pseuds/Fluterbev, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Panik/pseuds/Panik
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ten years after Blair’s dissertation went public he’s living a lonely, isolated life way across the country, his days filled with constant anxiety, jumping at every shadow. He’s got good reason to be afraid.</p><p>Just lately his paranoia has gotten worse. He knows his every move is being watched, he lives with that every day, but it seems more intense than usual. Either he’s finally losing his mind, or the thing he most dreads - the nightmare he’s already lived through once - is closing in for the kill.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> One day, around the time of the 10th Anniversary of the cancellation of The Sentinel, Fluterbev and Panik were sitting in Fluterbev’s backroom indulging in tea and crumpets, when one said to the other, “Hey, let’s write a story together, and be really mean to Blair,” to which the other one replied, “Okay! And let’s be really mean to Jim too.” There was much nodding of heads and gleeful rubbing together of hands, and there may have been maniacal cackling involved. Certainly another round of tea and crumpets were indulged in as the idea took shape, and as work continued a few bottles of wine were added to the tally as well. Our diabolical brainchild was thus offered up for Moonridge, and ‘Decimated’ (which takes place ten years after the events of the TV show concluded) is the result. 
> 
> Needless to say, when two exponents of angst like Fluterbev and Panik get together, you end up with angst squared. This story is quite intense, and contains some potentially upsetting elements, so please note the tags and be warned.
> 
> Thank you to everyone who donated to Moonridge for this story, and double thanks to our beta, Psychgirl, who coincidentally was also one of our donators.

Blair turned the key in the lock. The apartment was dark, empty, slightly stinky with forgotten garbage. The alarm beeped insistently, impatiently urging him to turn it off as he flipped on the light while shutting the door with his foot, reaching into his pocket for the control, fishing around, finding that the tear in the lining had opened up again. _Shit_.

He rested the over-filled bag of groceries on the hall table and rooted around in the depths of his tweed jacket, finally locating it and tearing even more of the thin, faded lining as he ripped the annoying thing out of his pocket. He pressed the button, cancelling the security alarm just as it was about to start screaming.  
  
Breathing a tired sigh he hefted up the bag, feeling the ominous greasy wetness around his hands, the sudden savory smell; realizing his Moroccan take-out had gotten tipped up and had leaked into the bottom of the bag. He rushed to the kitchen to get the soggy-bottomed paper bag on the counter before it gave way.  
  
Finding the leaking pot of charmoula sauce he replaced the lid, saving what he could, licked his fingers and rinsed his hands under the faucet. The kitchen still smelled of this morning’s coffee; the piece of burnt bagel he’d prized from the toaster with a fork still lay by the sink. He tossed it into the over-filled trash, wrinkling his nose, telling himself he really needed to take that out tomorrow without fail.  
  
The TV remote was on the kitchen counter, next to a scummy mug of cold, forgotten coffee. He pressed the on button; there was nothing on he wanted to see but the sound punctured the silence, filled the emptiness. He tipped the mug of coffee down the sink then put the groceries away, working on autopilot, hardly thinking, his mind fogged and tired and perpetually elsewhere.  
  
He looked away as he reached through the door and switched on the bedroom light, his head full of grim imaginings, refusing to acknowledge the shadowy figure he often glimpsed there, knowing it was only fear playing with his mind, knowing - if the shadow was real – that he wouldn’t have enough time left to feel afraid.  
  
He moved to the window, shielding his body behind the wall as he peered through the blind at the well-lit parking lot below. He liked this building; it wasn't perfect, but he couldn’t afford perfect. For the money it had great security. The area outside was well-lit, there were cameras and no spooky vegetation to play tricks with the mind. His last place had been nicer in many ways; bigger, more spacious with better views, but there’d been way too much landscaping, too many trees - the slightest breeze had made the branches dance with sudden, startling, terrifying movements and cast deep shadows - too many dark places where a person might hide.  
  
He took a good long look. There was no one out there, there couldn’t be, there _wasn’t_. He snapped the blind closed, stripped and showered.  
  
Wrapping hips and hair in towels still damp from the morning and avoiding his own eyes in the mirror, he went to the bedroom, found his pajamas on the floor by the bed and put them on. Flannel pants, cotton t-shirt, two sizes too big; warm, comfortable and familiar, like a mother’s hug. They made him feel safe.  
  
Leaving the bedroom light on, he went back to the kitchen, nuked his take-out in the microwave, opened the fridge, flipped the cap on a beer, tipped the fridge door closed with his ass and took his beer and his food to the couch. He put his feet on the cluttered coffee table, eating without tasting, letting his mind slide as he stared at the TV, watching without watching until his eyes started to close.  
  
When he knew he was exhausted enough to fall asleep he took his takeout back to the kitchen, rested the empty bottle on the precariously tipping pile under the sink (made a mental note to make time for recycling at the weekend), flipped off the TV, went back to the bedroom and switched the TV on in there. Then he brushed his teeth and got into the big cold bed where no one but him ever slept. He fell asleep with the lights on, the TV playing softly through the night with infomercials and vintage sitcoms that slipped into his dreams.

*

"And so these ancient patterns, only really visible from the air, have, for a long time been assumed to be religious, messages to the Gods, perhaps, with a meaning long lost. So!” he smiled. “Before next time, I need to you find me some of the latest research on the Nazca lines and write me a brief paper.” He waited for the groans to subside. “A minimum thousand words. Come on, people! I need twelve papers from you this semester. This is a short and easy one. It just takes a little work-”

”But Blair!” Susanne Jones griped. “We’ve barely touched on the Nazca civilizations…”  
  
”Exactly! This is not about the Nazca, it’s about improving your research capacity which, I have to say, judging from your scores on the Amazon paper, are sadly lacking. People, you’re graduates, on a post-grad study and you still don’t know how to think for yourselves. That’s why we have seminars, not so I can spoon feed you with information, but so you learn to think and debate. I want a short paper so I can see what you’re capable of finding and how you express yourself. So, go, impress me with your research skills. Remember our mantra?”  
  
His study group intoned, “If you Google, you will find.”  
  
Blair grinned. “Excellent. As a _starting_ point the internet is our greatest tool, but for real research, you need to put in some serious library time. No cut and pastes from Wiki, please, people. I’ve been there myself, hell, I _wrote_ a lot of it, if you quote Wikipedia to me, _I will_ know and I _will_ fail your paper. I want to see _citation_. This is not, I repeat, not about current research on the Nazca lines, it’s about your ability to seek and-”  
  
”Destroy?” Helen, his brightest, favorite student said with a grin.  
  
“That remains to be seen,” Blair smiled. “Gauging from some of your essays, that’s a pretty good analogy for your grasp of written English.” He raised his hands. “That’s it, we’re,” he checked his watch, “way over time here. It’s the weekend people, what are you waiting for? Haven’t you all got parties to go to?”  
  
A wave of hesitation washed through the room. They all looked at Mike Mikalowski. Blair watched them, waited.  
  
“Blair…” Mike began - none of his students ever called him ‘Professor’ or even ‘Mister’ Sandburg. He might have mostly grey hair now, but his skin was smooth and unlined. He still dressed to please himself, not the University, and had an enthusiastic, energetic youthful air that endeared him to his small group of students. They all thought of him as much closer to their age than he actually was - which was five months past his fortieth birthday.  
  
“We’re actually having a little party at my place next Friday,” Mark ventured. “We’ll all be there and we were wondering if you’d like to come along?”  
  
Blair felt his heart begin to race. He blinked nervously, not sure what to say.  
  
“We’d be so happy if you’d come,” Helen said. The whole group were watching him expectantly, several of them nodding encouragingly.  
  
“Well, I, I, I...” He shut his eyes for a second, swallowing down the shameful stutter that had sprung up out of nowhere. “I… don’t know, Mike,” seeing the falling faces, the disappointment. “Evenings are very hard for me.”  
  
Mike nodded. Blair knew there was speculation; Sandburg’s secret life. He never went out at night, didn’t go out much in the day either, driving to the U. alone each day, from his home where no one ever got invited, eating sandwiches at his desk, drinking his own coffee. Many had tried to lure him out for weekends, evenings, lunches, even dates, but he always refused; eventually, people stopped asking. Now this. What was he going to say?  
  
He pasted on a bright smile. “Look, uh… Let me look at my schedule, have a think about it, see if I can’t juggle…” He raised his hands helplessly. “I’ll get back to you.” The group nodded sadly, picked up their bags and slouched out together.  
  
Blair closed the door after the last of them, slumped down at his desk and tried to remember how to breathe. The panic caught him suddenly, without warning. His throat tightened, his lungs felt like they were slowly filling with concrete as he gripped the edge of the desk, white knuckled and afraid, clamping his eyes shut, riding it out, fighting it down. Sweat broke out on his forehead as his breath escaped in a gasp, then a sob. He held his head in his hands, breathing slowly, deeply, until he had himself back under control. Fumbling for the drawer, dragging it open, he grabbed at the bottle of pills he kept there for emergencies like these. Reaching for his flask of water, he poured some into a glass, with hands that shook so badly half of it spilled, pooling neatly on the beeswaxed mahogany. He tipped the pills out on to the desk, taking two, swallowing them down.  
  
Blair didn’t leave his office for the rest of the day. He had his own coffee, his own snacks; he had no need to venture out into the long, lonely, terrifying corridors of the faculty. Nervous of empty places, frightened in busy ones, he stayed at his desk for as long as he could, watching the clock, knowing Martin the security guard would be along at ten to lock up and make him leave, cheery and joking and so hard to deal with.  
  
So at nine fifty-eight exactly, Blair was out of the door, his battered, beloved old leather knapsack in one hand, mace in the other, heart racing as he hurried across the well-lit, well-protected parking lot to his anonymous little Nissan: two years old, pale blue, economic, practical and exactly like a thousand others, carefully chosen to draw the minimum possible attention.  
  
He drove straight home, too shaken from the afternoon’s panic attack to think about stopping for take-out. He wanted, needed, to be home; to be safe in his space.  
  
His heart began doing its usual tap dance as he locked his car and prepared for the nightly dash from his parking spot to his building. It was the most stressful moment of his day, thirty-seven dark seconds when he was at his most vulnerable. Keeping tight hold to his little can of mace as he reached the door, he punched in the security code. Safely inside he closed the door behind him, pausing briefly to check his mailbox. His heart beat faster still when he saw what was in there; part terror at the implied proximity of its deliverer, part elation at the anticipated contents. Retrieving his mail and locking the box he jogged up the stairs. He always took the stairs, they were open and bright and it was about the only exercise he got these days.  
  
Reaching his door, sliding the key in the lock, reaching inside to flip on the light before slipping inside. Slamming the door shut, locking it against the world with a sigh of relief, he leaned back against it, dropping the junk mail and fast-food flyers to the floor and retaining only the one, large, hand-delivered envelope which he clutched tight to his chest like the most precious treasure.  
  
Which of course, in the context of his sorry parody of a life, it truly was.

*

Blair wiped his palm across his face. He was tired; of course he was. He’d been at the library since five am, unable to sleep, incapable of lying awake in his bed, unable to stand the flickering shadows cast by the TV that seemed to move and wander around his room. Unable to turn off the TV, to be alone in the silence and the dark.  
  
So he’d come to the library to work and to savor the latest mail drop, hiding himself in a dimly-lit corner behind a pile of books, where he tipped out the precious contents; precious, but heartbreaking.  
  
“Hey Mom,” he whispered to the images laid out on the table, lit bright with the light and color of a tropical sun. _Bali_ , he read. No specific location just: _In the Tejakula region, teaching English to local orphans, taking classes in batik and silver-smithing_.  
  
“Ah, Mom,” Blair smiled. The cold, bald words on the printed page still managed to convey Naomi's essence, shining a brief light into his dark and terrified world. The pictures, taken on a long lens, showed her skipping with little girls in peacock colors; running for a ball along a long, golden beach; riding a bicycle down a street lined with frangipani and banana trees; running from the rain with a magazine over her head, her long silk sarong, wet, and sticking to her legs. He touched his finger to one laughing image. She never seemed to change, never aged, his beautiful mom, such a force of nature. For a moment, he indulged his favorite fantasy, of grabbing a plane to her last known location, finding her, telling her everything, then disappearing together, deep into the jungle somewhere, somewhere they could never be found.  
  
He closed his eyes against the threat of tears. He couldn’t do it, he wouldn’t. After all these years. He was doing this for her, all for her; burying himself alive so she could live. The regular delivery, showing her life in another world, was his reward, an incentive to keep playing by the rules. He wiped his hands across his face again and checked the clock: seven am; his building would be open and so would Starbucks and he really needed coffee.  
  
Mission achieved, he carried his maple-syrup latte and lemon muffin back down Franklin, cutting past green lawns and trees resplendent with red and orange leaves, to his office, all the time resisting the urge to cast nervous glances over his shoulder, at the street, at the parked cars, at the relaxed and comfortable people around him, strolling, reading, hurrying off to morning lectures. Nothing new in that, paranoia had been his constant companion for years, except that lately, quite suddenly, it had gotten worse, much, much worse. It was like he _knew_ that someone was out there, watching him.

But why? There was no reason. He’d done everything that’d been asked of him, he’d kept his side of the strange bargain. So why this sudden sense of terror, of impending doom? Had something changed? Or had ten years of constant stress and loneliness finally taken their toll? Was he finally going insane?  
  
Hurrying back now, as fast as he could. He was out of breath, a diet too high in sugar and caffeine, a too sedentary life. He ought to get to the gym, to the pool, cut down on the junk food. He was almost at his building now, the lofty, colonnaded Bynum Hall which reminded him a lot of Hargrove; hell, it even had a fountain. He sped up, scurrying faster toward his goal despite the stitch building in his side, feeling the predator’s eyes on his back - a hunter, gathering speed, moving in for the kill - suddenly desperate to be inside, behind closed doors. He broke into a run, up the steps and through the door. Finally back in familiar surroundings he hurried down the corridor, dragged himself upstairs to his office, fumbled his keys. Then, blessedly, he was finally inside, the door closed, leaning back, catching his breath.

He was nuts, going nuts. He was crazy, there was no other explanation. In a perfect world he’d go see a shrink, talk to someone, _anyone_ , but that was against the rules. He staggered to his desk, sat down hard. He was sweating. His seminar group would be here at nine, in forty minutes. Forty minutes to clean up, change his shirt, drink his coffee, eat his muffin, calm down, collect himself, prepare himself to face another day. 

*

Parked on the corner, the man in the blue Taurus - who had unobtrusively tailed Blair home last night then followed him back to the university this morning - shook his head in disgust.  He’d had Sandburg under surveillance for days now, not wanting to make a move until he’d known what he was dealing with. The guy, from what he’d learned since he’d gotten here, was an easy mark. Apart from this morning’s earlier start he’d followed the exact same routine every day, staying mostly invisible, living the life of a loner, seemingly afraid of his own shadow.  
  
He had good reason to be afraid.


	2. Chapter 2

The seminar with his students ran over-time. There was a lot to cover, it was almost Fall Break with Halloween just two weeks after that, and no one was in the mood for work. Eventually the meeting degenerated into chat and bonhomie, and it was well into the afternoon when the meeting broke up.  
  
Blair stood at the window and watched them walk away, laughing and joshing, bouncing along, full of life and joy. He remembered how that felt, that free and easy pre-vacation feeling, heading into town for beers and parties and a couple of extra days of freedom ahead.  
  
He stayed in his office the rest of the day. The town would be full of student revelers and he couldn’t deal with that. He dreaded every break in his routine - the four long, empty days to come, trying to fill the hours, stay busy, keep it together. So he stayed at his desk until shadows began to gather with their attendant phantoms. Soon Martin would be here, jangling his keys, irritating him with the same old joke: had his students super-glued him to his chair _again_?  
  
Closing his eyes, he steeled himself for the long dark walk to his car, and the prospect of another lonely night at home, alone.

*

Getting in was child’s play. Sandburg had invested in a security system that any amateur could crack, given time and a little ingenuity. He, however, was no amateur, and with the specialized equipment he carried he was inside the apartment in a matter of seconds, its sleeping occupant none the wiser, the ever-present drone of the TV masking any slight sounds he might make. 

He’d waited until Sandburg had gone to sleep before making his move. His target’s breathing was even, the intermittently stampeding horse of his heartbeat had finally calmed to the closest to a steady lub-dub that it had been all day. It seemed that Sandburg had gotten spooked, even though he’d not actually seen his watcher. He always had been a perceptive little shit.  
  
The intruder moved to stand beside the bed, and looked down at his sleeping quarry. Up close the marks of age were clear, but compared to him Sandburg had had it easy. A cushy post as a professor, presented to him on a plate in return for information he’d been only too willing to supply. After ten years behind a desk he’d put on weight, lost muscle-mass, gotten soft. Sandburg’s unexpectedly grey hair, he thought bitterly, had not come at anything like the price _he’d_ been forced to pay.  
  
For a moment, as he looked down on the face of his nemesis, he fantasized about ending it right now, right here. It would be so easy, he’d done it at least a dozen times before. A hand over the nose and mouth, and pressure applied just _so_. The guy would never even wake up, and the cops would say that he died in his sleep of natural causes. Case closed.

Except it wouldn’t be closed for him, would it? Because, as revenge went, it was a piss-poor option. There would be no wounded baby-blue eyes, wide with panic above a punishing, silencing hand, desperately seeking succor, begging for life.  
  
He really wanted to see that. But even more, he wanted answers first. An apology might be pushing it but, when it came to forcing people to tell him what he wanted to hear, there was no one more adept than he.  
  
He could have woken Sandburg there and then and gotten down to business, but he decided to bide his time. He’d waited ten years, after all, and he was a patient man. He knew from his surveillance that Sandburg was a poor sleeper, usually waking several times during the night, getting out of bed to fetch a glass of water or to use the john. Sometimes he sat up through the dark hours drinking tea and flicking between channels on the TV, as if his mind was too wired to settle on any one thing.  
  
All he had to do was wait.  
  
It didn’t take long. Almost an hour into his silent vigil - his presence masked in a dark corner untouched by the flickering light cast by the TV - Blair shifted on the bed, muttering something unintelligible, as if plagued by dreams. A short while later he rolled over and pushed himself upright. Scratching an armpit absentmindedly he rose, yawning, and headed blindly to the bathroom, feeling his way myopically as he went.  
  
When the overhead fan kicked in, the watcher stirred and took up position outside the bathroom door. And when Sandburg emerged a moment later, shutting off the bathroom light as he came through the door, he made his move.  
  
The cry of pure, animalistic terror that forced itself out of Sandburg’s throat when he grabbed him should have gone a long way toward satisfying his need for retribution, but to his surprise it just turned his stomach. Ruthlessly he quenched the sick feeling and propelled Sandburg backwards into the wall so hard that it knocked the ability to make any further sound out of him. Just to press the point, he gripped Sandburg around the throat and growled, “Make another noise like that and you’re a dead man.”  
  
Sandburg went rigid, breathing hard. “Jim?” he rasped, his voice impeded by the hand constricting his airway, his expression raw with confusion and fear and an incongruous glimmer of hope. “Jim? Is that you?”  
  
“I’ve not used that name for a long time,” Jim sneered. “But I guess it’ll suffice.” He looked Sandburg up and down, his tone full of the derision he felt. “Stupid of you to keep _your_ name, Sandburg. You should have known that I’d come looking.”  
  
“I hoped you would,” Blair said, confounding Jim with his answer. “I’m sorry, I know I’m not supposed to say that. But Jim, man…” he blinked, his face twisting awkwardly under Jim’s restraining hold as though he might cry. “It’s really good to see you.”  
  
Jim snorted. “Yeah, I bet it is.” He pushed Sandburg harder against the wall, the hand around the guy’s neck tightening in clear threat, making him grunt with surprise and discomfort. With his other hand Jim flipped the light switch on the wall, flooding the room with bright light. “Take a good, long look, buddy boy, because I’m the last thing you’ll ever see.”  
  
Blair blinked owlishly as his eyes adjusted to the glare. Even though Jim had been able to see him perfectly clearly in the darkness, the light added shadows and angles to his bloodless face that hinted at something considerably less than inner peace. As the tense impasse progressed beyond seconds into minutes Jim expected him to make some smart-assed comment; Sandburg had resorted to that tactic in the past when in a tight spot, and he was more than ready to deal with him on that score. Brut to his surprise Blair kept silent, breathing in pained gasps and looking utterly defeated.  
  
Jim was moved to speak first. “Is that it?” he demanded. “Hello, I’m glad to see you?” He shook his head in wonder, hoping to provoke him, and squeezed just a _little_ bit tighter. “You’re not even going to beg for your life, huh?”  
  
Blair’s eyes sought Jim’s, and the despair in them almost made him back up a step, despite all the years of anger and hate which had led up to this moment. Jim’s hand, which with just a slight increase of pressure would have crushed Sandburg’s windpipe, slackened off just enough that Blair took a painful breath, and then another.  
  
“You have to leave,” Blair rasped. “If you’re seen here, with me...” he blinked rapidly, his eyes watering. “Please, man,” he begged.  “Please go.”  
  
“Oh, I’m gonna go, all right,” Jim promised. Then he increased the pressure in just the right place. Sandburg flailed in panic, but only briefly, and Jim had no trouble keeping him restrained. He soon went limp, his eyes rolling up into his head, and Jim caught him before he hit the floor. “The thing is, Sandburg,” he said to the unresponsive body he held, “you’re coming with me.”


	3. Chapter 3

The traffic was light this early in the morning, with dawn still some way off. That was a relief for Jim, because he wanted to be well away from the city before the drugged man in the trunk of his car woke up.  
  
Long-standing habits of hyper-vigilance, pounded into him throughout ten years of living right on the edge, kept part of Jim’s awareness on Blair’s breathing as he drove, which right now was steady and slow, if a little raspy since the duct tape covering his mouth was forcing him to breathe through his nose. It sounded as though his airway was a little congested.  
  
Jim would have to do something about that, he decided with ruthless, untroubled practicality. He didn’t want his prisoner to be starved of oxygen, but couldn’t afford for him to call out and attract attention. Maybe he’d give Sandburg a choice once he woke up: silence, or suffocation. It was amazing how compliant someone could become once their ability to breathe was compromised.  
  
Jim drove with care, staying within the posted speed limit, not doing anything to draw attention, not even reacting with anything other than passive indifference when some asshole driving a pickup cut him off. Outwardly he remained calm, unobtrusive – he’d gotten good at that, at blending in, at hiding his emotions, keeping his cool. He’d had plenty of practice because inside, rage consumed him, a rage he’d been forced to live with, to nurture and conceal, for ten desperate, unendurable years.  
  
The focus of his rage, the ultimate betrayer, slept on in the trunk of the car, oblivious.  
  
Jim smiled in cold satisfaction. Sandburg would not be oblivious for much longer.

*

Consciousness came in stages. Slowly negotiating his way through murky depths, past dark, sweaty places and confusing, hidden voices, the low rumbling of the wheels on the road too familiar to impact his disturbed, perplexing dreams. Then, suddenly, horribly awake, an itch on his nose, and trying to scratch and couldn’t… couldn’t move his hands which were cold and dead, trapped beneath him and, struggling, still couldn’t because... His wrists were tied. There was tape over his mouth. And then he remembered: _Jim_. Suddenly finding it hard to breathe, eyes wide open, staring into the dark, panting and terrified.

A bump in the road threw him hard against the roof of what he now understood was the trunk of a car and full blown panic came on him with the sudden rush of a storm. He kicked his feet against the metal walls, screaming, or trying to, the duct tape across his mouth stopping all but a feeble whistling wail from escaping, but he screamed anyway, screamed and screamed until he ran out of air, a shower of dark lights and sparkles warning he was about to pass out and he couldn’t do that, whatever they intended… whatever Jim... oh God, _Jim_ …

Jim had been there, in his apartment, threatening him, throttling him. Had Jim abducted him after that, locked him in here? He closed his eyes, concentrated on his breathing. Control, take control. Stay calm. Calm down. Remembering the meditation techniques he’d learned as a child when Naomi… Mom, oh Mom! Did Jim know where she was? Is that where they were going? What was he planning?

What if it wasn’t Jim driving the car? What if it was _them_?

Fighting it back. Mustn’t. Mustn’t lose it, mustn’t panic, stay calm, keep a clear head. Jim, not them. Gotta believe it’s Jim. Calm, calm, that was it. Visualize. Blue. Blue skies, calm seas. Cerulean blue…  
  
Light was getting in somewhere, piercing laser-lights shooting through the hot, dark, trunk. Pushing his feet, shifting a little and tilting his head, he could see the holes punched in the side of the car and winced, the bright light momentarily blinding him.  
  
The flashes of light and dark slowly resolved so he could see the world dashing by: dark road, white lines, occasionally another vehicle overtaking. Why were there holes? They looked like bullet holes. Not that unexpected a sight in Jim’s car but this seemed to be a brand-new car, still had that new-car smell. He wondered what, why, _how_ Jim had gotten involved in a shootout in the very recent past. Slowly he realized, craning his neck, that there were holes in the other side too. The bullets had passed right through only… they hadn’t. Blinking hard, it dawned on him that Jim had punched air holes in the trunk. Air holes. Like you would for a bug in a jar. He was the bug in Jim’s jar. This was no quick journey to an ultimate end. Jim wanted to keep him alive, locked up, for… how long?  
  
His heart began racing. It was suddenly hard to breathe again. It was so _hot_ in here, too hot. No air was getting in. The atmosphere was thick with exhaust fumes, he was being poisoned, slowly suffocated and in _pain_. Bounced around, bruised and battered, his wrists tied, he couldn’t feel his hands; he was losing all feeling in his hands. If this went on, his hands would die, he’d get gangrene. He was _dying_ in here. He had to get out or he’d _die!_ He screamed again, over and over and kicking, kicking as hard as he could, and _screaming_ , knowing that no one would hear, fearing that someone would.  

*

 In his weaker moments, Jim Ellison had sometimes wondered if Sandburg would be impressed by how adept a sentinel he’d become.

After years of honing his abilities in the most desperate of conditions, his senses had become seamlessly threaded through his awareness, heightening his consciousness so that it was an effort to distinguish where he ended, and the world around him began. That lack of division had saved his life on more than one occasion, allowing him to hear/see/smell and even _taste_ enemies approaching, and thus dispatch them before they even knew he was there.  
  
When his weaker moments passed he would remind himself forcefully, over and over, that the Sandburg in his imagination – the friend who had enthusiastically supported him and nurtured his abilities - had never truly existed. That the man who was right at this moment waking up in the trunk had, in fact, sold Jim out without a second thought before heading off into a bright new sunset of his own. And as a result, Jim had spent ten years in purgatory, sentenced to vicariously experience every death he’d perpetrated through the same, seamless senses which kept him alive, hour after endless, unendurable hour.  
  
His rage at that betrayal was the only thing which enabled him to keep pity at bay, because right now he could sense Sandburg’s terror as if it was his own, just as he had with so many others before him. Blair’s panic seeped out of his pores, filling the car like a miasma, infusing Jim with its potency.  
  
With the benefit of long-held practice, Jim rekindled his rage afresh, encouraging it to suffuse him, fanning it into flame and allowing it to burn away the shuddering, second-hand dread. It was easy after that, to subdue the urge to stop the car, to release Blair, to let him breathe unimpeded, to reassure him that he was going to live (at least for now). Because, of course, Jim had no intention of letting him die. Not yet.  
  
Not, at least, until he’d been given a taste of what it was to be helpless, trapped, and without hope.  
  
He listened dispassionately, therefore, as Blair breathed through his initial panic and gained back a measure of control, which was no more than Jim expected, of course, knowing him as he did. Considering the resourcefulness Sandburg had shown a million years ago and a world away, back in Cascade, Jim was fully aware that his former partner would not be an easy subject to crack.

Sandburg possessed deceptive reserves of strength, as Jim well knew, a quick-thinking, calculating intelligence that would kick in just as soon as he realized where he was. Jim could predict exactly how it would go. Sandburg would put all his considerable mental energy toward finding a way to escape; searching the trunk for some tool to use to open the trunk and free himself. When that failed, he would lay low until he got an opportunity to use guile, and utilize that silver tongue of his to persuade Jim to let him go.

Jim had no intention of giving him that opportunity. And he was prepared to be very patient indeed. He’d keep Sandburg subdued for as long as it took to ensure that he finally got it, until he _absolutely_ understood that there was to be no way out.  
  
An overwhelming wash of sheer, unadulterated panic disturbed his equilibrium and obliterated his carefully-considered predictions. Sandburg was hyperventilating suddenly, or attempting to, but his breathing was impeded by the tape over his mouth and the slight congestion in his airway. And – shit! – he was kicking out, screeching mindlessly in the back of his throat, making noise, drawing attention. He was losing it, big time.  
  
His mouth set in disapproval, Jim indicated left and, ignoring the ‘posted’ signs, pulled off onto the next private road he came to, urgently needing to go somewhere off the beaten track and deal with the situation. The track he found himself on was ringed with mature woodland on both sides. He judged it private enough. A cursory casting out of his senses confirmed to him that the only people within miles of this place were currently in the vehicles passing back and forth on the highway he’d left behind.

He drove for two or three miles, the track growing progressively more bumpy as he went. Sandburg’s panicky flailing gradually subsided until the body in the trunk rolled and pitched bonelessly along with the momentum of the car.  
  
Judging that he’d gone far enough, that there would be no chance of any sounds they made being audible from the road, Jim stopped the car and killed the engine before flinging open the door. A couple of long strides brought him to the trunk which he opened quickly, standing back and holding his breath as the wave of heat and terror-stench overwhelmed him. He reached in and effortlessly hauled out the insensible body of his captive.  
  
Sandburg’s lack of consciousness was deep enough that he didn’t even react when Jim dumped him on the ground and ripped the tape from his mouth. Taking out a knife, Jim cut through the plastic ties which confined Blair’s hands behind his back, before ensuring his airway was clear and moving him into the recovery position.  
  
Now that his gag had been removed Blair seemed to be breathing normally, although his complexion was flushed and clammy. His unfamiliar gray hair, sparsely threaded through with dark strands, made him look impossibly old for a man of forty. That latter fact filled Jim with an odd sense of sorrow. He bit it down.  

He took some time to get what he needed from the car. The moment Blair began to stir, Jim opened a bottle of water and dumped half of it onto Sandburg’s face.  
  
Sandburg woke up spluttering and flailing, eyes wide with shock.  
  
Handing him the remainder of the bottle before he had a chance to react further, Jim ordered, “Drink as much as you need to. I won’t offer again until we get where we’re going.”  
  
Hands shaking, Blair did as he was told, spilling most of it down his front in the process. When the bottle was empty, Jim flipped him onto his front and restrained him easily, before snapping another plastic tie in place on his wrists. Jim was reaching for the roll of duct tape he’d retrieved from the car when Blair’s desperate plea made him pause. “No! Please, Jim, don’t!”  
  
“Tough shit, Sandburg,” Jim said. He tore off a piece of tape and pressed it firmly over Blair’s lips, then hauled him upright and forced him to walk.  
  
Sandburg’s panic reached its zenith as they neared the open trunk of the car. He breathed through his nose in frightened, congested gasps, pushing back against Jim as if he expected _him_ to save him from his fate.  
  
Out of patience Jim hauled him up bodily and dumped him inside. Staring down at him dispassionately, he offered some advice. “Breathe slow and easy, don’t hyperventilate and you’ll stay conscious. But if you make that much noise again, I’ll hold your nose until you pass out.” That said, he slammed the trunk shut.  
  
As Ellison drove back down the track toward the main road, he deliberately turned his awareness away from the frightened man trussed up in the trunk behind him, but Blair’s horrified, wounded eyes, when he’d told him what he’d do to him if he made a noise, haunted his sense-memory like an accusation.

*

 _What the hell is going on?_ Was the only thought in Blair's head, endlessly turning, round and around like a ball in a tumble-dryer, never stopping long enough for his brain to get a handle on it; thoughts spinning, making him dizzy and sick.

 _Until we get where we’re going_ , Jim had said. Where were they going, and why? Why was Jim doing this to him? For a hopeful moment Blair had wondered if Jim’s behavior was maybe a ruse, a trick to fool any pursuers, a rescue in disguise so the watchers would think Blair had no choice but to go along. But Jim’s demeanor, his cold, finely calculated cruelty, felt all too real.  
  
And it was so hot in here. Hot and airless and the tape on his mouth, the tight, enclosed darkness, all adding to his claustrophobia, his suffocation and the fear that was numbing his mind, making it impossible to think.  
  
And if this wasn’t a ruse, what if the watchers had seen Jim come to his home, and knew they had left together? They might not believe that Blair was here against his will. What was Jim _thinking_? He was putting everything at risk! Blair’s head spun, a log-jam of conflicting thoughts robbing him of the ability to reason. All he could think was that when his absence was noticed, they’d go ahead and do what they’d threatened all along: they’d go after Naomi, do to Naomi what they’d done to Blair. And then they’d come after him and Jim and start all over again.  
  
The fear that had kept him in terror for ten years caused his panic to spike, made him kick out, try to scream, robbed him of air, then sent him spiraling back into the dark.

*

Sandburg had passed out again. Jim considered going to check on him, but his breathing seemed to have improved now he was unconscious and no longer panicking, and he decided to leave him be. 

Their first overnight stop wasn’t far off, in any case. So, keeping one ear on Sandburg's body, rolling lifelessly in the trunk, Jim stepped on the gas. He needed to get them to their destination quickly, because it looked like these panic attacks were going to be an ongoing problem and he couldn’t afford to keep stopping every few miles. Likewise, he wasn’t ready to remove the gag just yet, he needed Sandburg suitably cowed into submission before that would be an option.  
  
Jim’s aim was to keep Sandburg scared and off-balance, but his extreme reactions had been a surprise. Sandburg had always been a resilient little bastard, who coped well in the moment and lost it later, if he lost it at all. Jim was vaguely disgusted at Sandburg's unexpected inability to hack it, although he was more disgusted with himself for not considering that things might not go to plan.  
  
Never mind. They’d stop soon, and then he’d make sure that Sandburg understood _exactly_ how things were going to progress from here. It’d be better for both of them that way.

*

The jaw-rattling shudder of the car as it passed over a rough, pot-holed dirt track shook Blair awake. Opening his eyes and finding only the dark momentarily confused him, but then remembering, his confusion turning to dread when the car stopped and the engine cut out. Barely breathing, he waited.

And waited.  
  
The engine ticked into silence. The thin streams of cool air that trickled in through the holes in the car when they were moving, that had sustained him through long painful hours of semi-suffocation, were stilled now the car was stationary. Very quickly the air became stifling, tainted with burnt rubber and gasoline. Drenched in sweat and robbed of oxygen, dread turned to out-and-out terror as a dozen scenarios, each more nightmarish than the last, raced through his mind. Sweat was pooling on the rubber beneath him, soaking his t shirt and pajama pants. He wanted to be sick, he thought he might faint. He started to panic again.  
  
Then the trunk swung open, and he almost wept with relief at the sudden, blissful rush of cool evening air. Jim bent down close and spoke quietly, threateningly. “Not a word, Sandburg, not a sound or I’ll hurt you. Do you understand?”  
  
Jim waited until he nodded, then hauled him up and on to his shoulder, as easily as he might a duffel bag. He lifted his bag with his other hand, carried both of them through a chipped yellow door into a dim and dingy room that smelled of cheap carpeting. Jim tipped the door closed with his foot, set Blair on his feet then slammed him into the wall.  
  
The hot, stifling hours in the trunk, the bruising buffeting and now this fresh fright was one horror too many. Blair’s stomach rebelled and he vomited violently. His mouth still sealed with tape, he instantly started to choke. Jim tore off the tape and Blair spewed warm, sickening water - all he had in his stomach - over Jim and down himself.  
  
“Goddamit!” Jim hissed, hauling him, still vomiting, into the bathroom.

 Blair muttered a frightened litany. “Sorry, I’m sorry, so sorry, I can’t help it, I’m sorry…” 

“Shut up.” A simple command which Blair instantly obeyed. Jim spun him around, cutting loose the tie binding his hands, before turning him back to face him, holding him at arm’s length, his nose wrinkled, his face disgusted. “God, Sandburg, you stink!” Blair was trembling violently. He knew how pathetic he was, he couldn’t help it, he was all done in, at the end of his line.  
  
“Get your clothes off.” Jim said, thrusting him away. “Your clothes are ruined, you reek, get them off.”  
  
Blair just stood there, staring. Exhausted, in shock, maybe? He couldn’t seem to stop shaking. He couldn’t seem to make his body obey his brain.  
  
“Take. Your. Clothes. Off!” Jim ordered in a voice that seemed to galvanize Blair’s paralyzed psyche. With shaking hands, fingers numb from being tied so long, he clumsily pulled his tee-shirt off over his head. God, Jim was right, he did stink. To a sentinel… No. No.  Blocking off the forbidden thought: mustn’t think about that, _mustn’t_. He closed his eyes tight, fighting back the panic that swelled like a wave about to break, while Jim stood immobile, watching and waiting, until Blair’d removed his sweaty, vomit-sodden pants. Naked now, he held his arms across his chest and frightened genitals, and stood shivering under Jim’s cold gaze, feeling hopeless, defenseless.  
  
Jim darted forward, seized him by his hair, dragged him under the shower and held him there while he turned the faucet. Icy water gushed down, making Blair yell out loud, trying to hold his head out of the flow as Jim held on tight, forcing Blair’s face up to meet it.  
  
He couldn’t breathe. His arms flailed helplessly while his mind flashed back and he was drowning again. “Jim! Please! Please!” he screamed, to no avail as he struggled to free himself from the water and Jim’s implacable grasp. Held tight. No escape. Just like last time, with her, the other sentinel. And again: memory racing forward in time, to the water-boarding, when he was with _them_.  
  
After what seemed like an age, the water shut off and Blair was released to drop down hard against the chipped blue tiles, to sit, in a pool of cold water, exhausted, coughing, trembling like a half-drowned dog.  
  
“Get up,” Jim said, but Blair couldn’t. It was all he could do to breathe. He could no more obey than he could take Jim in a fight. He couldn’t even raise his head, there was nothing left in him.  
  
Jim reached down, hauled him up, dragged him to the bedroom, then forced him down to sit against the wall beside a radiator, the metal cold, the heating in this place apparently not switched on. Holding on to Blair’s wrists he bound them together once again with a nylon tie.  
  
“Jim...”  
  
“Shut up, Sandburg.”  
  
“But Jim…”  
  
“I said shut up.”  
  
Jim used a second tie to bind Blair’s wrists to the radiator.  
  
“Please, Jim. Tell me. What’s going on?”  
  
A look of pure fury passed over Jim’s face, a look so cold it froze the frantic stream of words forming on Blair’s tongue. Jim blinked once, seemed almost about to answer, then stood and stretched his back until his vertebrae clicked. “I’m taking a shower,” he said. He reached into his pocket and took out the duct tape.

Blair shook his head, frantically, found he wanted to cry. “You don’t need to use the tape, I’ll be quiet Jim,” he whispered breathlessly. “I mean it, I will, I swear, I mean, you’d be the first to hear if I made a noise, right? Right?” 

Jim glanced away, took a breath, like a harassed father dealing with a persistently naughty child. He fixed Blair with a glare and said quietly, “What part of ‘stay silent’ don’t you understand, you little shit?” He put his hands on his knees and leaned close. Blair caught the sour stench of his own vomit on Jim’s clothes, remembering that this was a man who’d once been pole-axed by the faintest scent of raw heroin, and wondered at his old friend’s effortless control.  
  
Jim snapped off some tape, fastened it over Blair’s mouth, rose and went into the bathroom, leaving Blair wet and shivering, arms bent awkwardly and cramping, mind working overtime and coming up with a hundred possible scenarios, a dozen potential escape plans, and all of them hopeless. Jim was a sentinel after all and now, it seemed, a hard and heartless, implacable… what? What was Jim now? Blair hadn’t seen Jim, or had any contact with him for ten years. It was one of the goddamn _rules_.  
  
Why had Jim kidnapped him? Because that’s what this seemed to be, _had_ to be: a kidnap. Jim was so angry, so cold and brutal. His eyes held no warmth, only hate and _why_? Blair had done everything he’d been told to do, hadn’t he? He’d given Jim the space that had been demanded, kept himself apart from the world, spoken to no one about sentinels or his life in Cascade. He’d never tried to contact anyone from his old life, he'd obeyed the rules about Naomi. He’d kept his mouth shut, kept his head down, kept his side of the bargain he'd agreed to when they took him, and hurt him and….  
  
No. He wouldn’t. Would not. Must not. Mustn’t think about that. Thinking just brought the panic back and he mustn’t panic. Panic only made Jim mad. He had to keep a cool head. He had to talk to Jim and try to find out what was going on so he could plan. Plan – what? _What_ plan? What plan could possibly succeed against a man like James Ellison?  
  
Because the one dawning conclusion, the _only_ conclusion Blair could come up with, the only one that fit all the facts, was that Jim was acting for _them_.

 Blair began to tremble, and not only with the cold. 

Jim didn’t take long in the shower. Seven minutes later he was back, fresh and shaved and unashamedly naked, drying himself off with a towel which he wrapped about his hips, then crouched down so his eyes were level with Blair’s. Blair cast a quick glance over the once-familiar torso. No longer familiar, Jim seemed made of tensile steel. There wasn’t a trace of softness, of mortality, in that over-honed, inhuman body. This close up, he could see that Jim had acquired a small tattoo under his left nipple: a name or a number; Blair couldn’t tell without his glasses.  
  
Jim spoke softly. “Okay, Sandburg, here’s how it’s going to go. I’m going to release you for exactly four minutes so you can use the bathroom. You will not remove the tape from your mouth, nor attempt to free your hands while in there, do you understand?” He waited for an answer. Blair nodded. Jim stood, took a cruel-looking knife from the bag and cut the tie binding Blair to the radiator. Blair’s still-bound arms flopped down, dead and useless. Jim rubbed his biceps, forearms and hands briskly, until some feeling returned. There was no warmth or compassion in the gesture, just a practical measure born of the necessity that Blair be able to operate his body as and when required.  
  
Jim looked him in the eye. “Can you move your arms?”  
  
Blair tried, found he could, just about, jerkily and clumsily.  
  
“Can you manage by yourself or do you need me to help you?”  
  
Blair shook his head vehemently. Jim gave a nod. He took Blair’s elbow, hauled him back to his feet and tossed him into the bathroom. “Four minutes and counting,” he said, and shut the door.  
  
Blair sat on the toilet, bound hands between his knees, and tried to think. He couldn't - couldn’t think, didn’t know whatto think, he couldn't pee. He needed to talk to Jim, he had so many questions, but Jim wouldn't let him speak and even if he did, Blair wasn’t sure if he’d be able. Jim had him so off balance. He was bruised and cold and hungry and so damn scared he could barely function at all.  
  
“You got two minutes left,” Jim called from the other side of the door. “I don’t hear anyone pissing. You don’t get another chance 'til morning and you don’t even wanna think about the consequences if you wet yourself, soldier.”  
  
 _Soldier_? What the hell? Filing that away for later consideration. Too scared to pee but somehow making himself, forcing his frightened bladder to empty, he finished up just as the door flew open.

“Time’s up."

Jim dragged him out, sat him back down on the floor by to the radiator and laid an energy bar and a bottle of water beside him. “I’m going to take off the tape so you can eat. You have my permission to _eat_. You don’t drink until I say you can, you got that?” He waited until Blair nodded before continuing. “You maintain silence. You do not speak or make any sound that is not commensurate with eating. Do you understand?” Blair swallowed, nodded. “Failure to comply with orders will result in punishment. Nod if you understand.” Blair nodded. Jim stripped off the gag.

Blair ate the disgusting flavorless bar in silence. Jim sat on the edge of the bed and did the same. Blair’s eyes were level with Jim’s ripped calves, eyes tracing up Jim’s inner thighs to an evil-looking scar, long and purple and puckered. Someone had sliced Jim’s thigh from his knee to... He couldn’t see where the scar finished, somewhere up under the towel.

Blair finished his ‘meal’, screwed up the wrapper, kept his eyes on the floor, at the ugly yellow swirls on the hideous orange carpet. He needed to ask the questions that were buzzing round in his head. He _had_ to, he was going nuts here. “Please tell me what’s going on, Jim.” He said it very quietly, felt Jim tense, raised his eyes to Jim’s. "I don’t… I don’t know why you’re doing this.”

Jim sat staring at him in cold, blue, impassive silence. Blair shivered.  
  
“Jim, I’m cold…”  
  
Jim stood and crouched down beside him, so they were eye to eye. Speaking in that same, whispering, terrifying tone he’d used earlier, he said, “Sandburg, you're not stupid. What part of ‘maintain silence’ don’t you understand?  
  
“Jim…”  
  
“I won’t tell you again. You think I won’t hurt you? I’m just waiting for an excuse.”  
  
Blair's now-constant shaking intensified. Tears started in his eyes. What the hell, he _wasn't_ going to cry.  
  
Jim stood, took a fresh tie from the bag.

Tears escaped down Blair’s face, he snorted, sniffed back a nose full of teary snot. The shakes took on a sudden, starling violence; oh God he was totally losing it here, he had to get a grip, hold it together.  “Jim,” his voice sounded tearful and desperate and panicked. “Don’t, don’t, please. _Please_ tell me what’s going on here, I can’t do this, Jim, I can’t.” 

The robot that called itself Jim held out the bottle of water. “Two mouthfuls,” it said. “No more, no less.” When Blair didn’t instantly comply, Jim gripped him by the back of the neck, pulled his head forward and forced the bottle to his mouth. He poured in a mouthful of water, and, pinching Blair's nostrils, gripping his jaw, forcing his mouth closed, Jim held Blair tight until he swallowed, then repeated the procedure. When he'd finished choking and gasping, Jim thrust him away.

Jim held out a small white pill. “Put this in your mouth.” When Blair failed to react, Jim yelled, loudly, angrily, “Do it!” Blair took the pill. Too frightened even to wonder what it was, he put it in his mouth. Jim held out the bottle. Blair took it, drank, swallowed the pill down, then Jim tied him to the radiator. Was he going to have to spend the night here, like this? How would he sleep? His arms were dead after less than half an hour. Ten hours of this would cripple him for life.  
   
Jim squatted down to look him in the eye. “You eat when I say, drink when I say. I won’t have you getting sick and dying on me, but you _ever_ speak to me again without permission, I’ll hurt you. Do you have any idea what I mean when I say that? Don’t try to answer Sandburg, believe me, you have _no_ idea of the kind of agony I can induce in your body with a single touch.” He stroked a gentle finger down Blair’s cheek. Blair squeezed his eyes tight shut, fighting to stop shaking and to hold back the humiliating tears.  
  
“Do you want me to give you a demonstration?” Jim asked. He waited until Blair shook his head, then nodded. “Good boy. You more than anyone should know that if you so much as breathe too loud, I’ll hear you. So.” He placed his hands on Blair’s stubbled cheeks, a parody of a lover’s caress. “You hold your peace, old buddy old pal, and I won’t be forced to make you scream. Okay?” Jim smiled, and slapped his hands against Blair’s face so hard that he gasped.  
  
When Jim let go, Blair's head drooped like a thirsty flower, to loll against his bound arms. His arms ached, his hands cramped, but it hardly seemed to matter anymore. The pill, some kind of sedative…  
  
Blair drifted a few moments more. He heard the bed springs squeak under Jim’s weight, heard Jim’s voice from far away, like he was speaking into a tin can. “This is it, Sandburg. This is your life now. Better get used to it.” Then darkness fell.

*

Jim waited until the sedative took full-hold, then got out of bed and went over to where Sandburg sat, slumped, insensible, against the radiator. Crouching down he cut the ties binding Sandburg’s wrists and lowered him to lie on the floor, then removed the duct tape from his mouth. 

The point was to ensure compliance, so it was unnecessary to keep Sandburg tied up like that when he wasn’t awake to experience it. Jim wanted him scared, wanted him off-balance. He didn’t want him damaged. Six hours tied up without circulation in his hands was not part of the plan.  
  
Jim was good at this. He knew how to make it work. It was far from the first time he’d established control of an uncooperative prisoner by using the minimum of force. Terror was an effective tool, and instilling it was something he excelled at.  
  
He didn’t have to like it, though. Not more than he needed to, for the sake of justice.  
  
Sitting back on his heels, Jim studied Sandburg. Now they’d stopped moving for the night, and he had leisure to consider it, Jim had to admit that he was shocked at how this had gone so far. The Sandburg he remembered had always been a fighter, not someone who had been easily cowed. The man lying unconscious on the floor before him, his hair prematurely grey, seemed unfamiliar to him, a different person from the mouthy, calculating one in his memory. Jim had to admit it’d thrown him for a loop.  
  
Sandburg had gone into full-blown panic mode several times, when Jim would have expected him to lie low and look for a chance to press an advantage. Fear and shock was part of the deal, but Sandburg's fright had been extreme and out of character, even under these circumstances. His blood pressure - easily determined by a single touch - was far higher than it should be. It was part of the reason Jim had decided to sedate him tonight, when originally he’d planned to turn the screws and forcibly establish the ground rules early on. He had been worried that Sandburg might stroke out on him, he was so stressed.  
  
He needed to take stock, and possibly revise his strategy. What he absolutely must not do was forget why he was here. Tailor the amount of force to be sufficient to get the job done, no more, no less. He must not allow himself to get soft, to be tempted to mitigate Sandburg’s punishment out of pity.  
  
And punishment it was; punishment that absolutely fitted the crime. Despite the glimmers of sympathy he'd sometimes felt today, he only had to remember what had happened the past few years, and how he’d constantly dreamed of inflicting this punishment to get his feelings back on track. Sometimes, it’d been the only thing that’d kept him going: the knowledge that, one day, he was going to make Sandburg feel every bit as trapped and hopeless as _he’d_ been made to feel.  
  
They’d made it abundantly clear to him, right when he’d first been taken, that Sandburg was responsible. Sandburg, they’d told him, had sold him out, his research – not just the dissertation, but everything else he’d learned about Jim over the years - had been the foundation of everything they’d turned Jim into. Sandburg’s reward for that heinous betrayal had been a sweet little deal. He'd been given everything he’d ever wanted; a tenured professorship, money, prestige, a chance to start over at the other side of the country. The arrogant little shit had believed himself so untouchable, he’d even kept his own name.  
  
Jim was determined to make him regret that oversight. To regret all of it.  
  
Familiar rage suffused him then, rage only matched by the constant agony of being duped, of being betrayed. Jim had loved Blair once, back when he’d bought into his lies. He’d killed for him, and would have died for him. In a way, he supposed he _had_ died for him. He was in no sense the person he’d once been. He would never be that person again.  
  
And after this, Blair would never be the same again, either.


	4. Chapter 4

Sandburg woke terrified and disorientated, just before dawn. Jim had sensed the imminent shift in consciousness before it occurred, and had moved swiftly and efficiently to remove the blanket he’d covered him with, gag him, and secure him back in place at the radiator.  
  
To Jim's surprise, Sandburg seemed to have taken to heart his warning to be quiet. As soon as he came awake he froze, breathing in frightened little gasps through his nose. He kept silent apart from involuntary small sounds of fright as Jim put him through his morning paces. “Brush your teeth, thirty seconds. Drink water, two mouthfuls. Clothes on, now!”  
  
Jim had planned ahead. When he’d taken him, Sandburg had been wearing pajamas; faded flannel, worn soft, like Sandburg himself. The clothes he provided for Sandburg now were utilitarian and nondescript. Khaki tee-shirt, loose-fitting sweatpants. No socks or shoes: if Sandburg somehow managed to run, he wouldn’t get far barefoot.  
  
The devastation on Blair’s face as Jim led him, hands bound, back to the trunk of the car, tugged incongruously at his conscience. Deciding that he could grant one small reward for Sandburg’s compliant silence this morning, Jim hauled him into the trunk, then held up the roll of duct tape. “You stay quiet, I keep this off. You make even one sound, and you stay gagged for the next two days. Do you understand?” At Blair’s look of terrified incomprehension, he barked, “Do you understand?”  
  
Blair nodded frantically, tears rolling down his face. Disgusted and furious with Sandburg for his weakness and lack of resistance, Jim slammed the trunk shut.  
  
It wasn’t supposed to be this way, Jim brooded resentfully as he pulled out of the lot and hit the open road. Goddamn it, it was supposed to be satisfying, at least to a point. It was supposed to be a fucking _challenge_. He’d planned this for a very long time, had gauged exactly how much pressure to use and how long it was going to take to crack Sandburg’s armor. How could he have miscalculated so badly? Or was this seeming vulnerability simply a ruse on Sandburg’s part, to throw him off-balance?

There was nothing to do now but proceed with the plan, see how it all panned out. 

*

Blair shifted uncomfortably, and with difficulty; there wasn’t much space to move around. Already his legs were jumping with cramp. Less than an hour into the journey, he could no longer feel his arms at all. 

He bent his face awkwardly against the torn, dirty blanket he was laying on, trying to get the maximum flow of air on his face from the holes in the side of Jim’s Taurus. He could see the landscape moving steadily past, the grey of the road, the red, gold and green of the forest beyond. Their speed was constant but not overly fast, he was guessing pretty much right on the speed limit. He heard little traffic, maybe one car passing every thirty minutes or so, usually on the other side of the road, heading in the opposite direction. They were leaving the world behind, moving into less populated country. The weather had cooled a little since yesterday, too, all commensurate with the more or less constant uphill climb the car had been making since leaving Chapel Hill. Jim was heading west, into the mountains, but where and why, and what for?  
  
Blair gave up the contorted position he was holding, slumping back a little, staring up into the gloom. The air was hotter and harder to breathe now, but lying on his back relieved the stress on his constricted limbs for a little while. He shifted his legs. His stomach heaved. He wanted to scream. He closed his eyes and took deep breaths. He was having to keep a constant check on his fear. If he let loose the panic that continually threatened to erupt… well, there was no telling what Jim might do if he had to stop the car again.  
  
Blair forced his body to lie loose, making each muscle relax one by one, releasing the tension. _Remember your Kundalini breathing_ , he admonished himself. Almost smiling, flooded with the warmth of fond memory: of Naomi and a peripatetic childhood, wandering along the many varied roads to enlightenment. He wondered what she was doing now, remembering the danger she would be in, and felt the panic rise again. The watchers might have already carried out their threat. Remembering again what he'd had to deal with, the nightmare he'd lived just to keep her safe from _them_.  
  
The Watchers.  
  
They’d thrown a sack over his head and tossed him in the trunk of his own car, held him in a cold concrete cell. No bed, no blanket, no comfort of any kind for… how long? He had no idea. They'd kept him bound too, bound and gagged with a hood on his head, beaten and hung from his wrists for hour-upon-hour. Deprived of sleep, pumped full of drugs and questioned and questioned for what seemed to be days, without rest, screaming at him, putting the fear of every God he knew into him. They told him they were watching Naomi, day and night, threatening to seize her, do all this to her, too if he didn’t do exactly as he was told.

He’d brought it upon himself, they’d told him. Jim was important, was special, and Blair had put him at risk. He had to get out of Jim’s life forever. Never see him again, never talk to him. Never, ever utter the word ‘sentinel’ again, not even _think_ it. And they’d reiterated that point over and over, making sure that Blair couldn’t even mouth the word without remembering the agony and the horror. 

And now the world of his nightmares was back, but it wasn’t the unknown men with the unknown voices doing this to him, it was _Jim_. Was the end going to be the same? Was Jim one of them? Would he tie him and starve him and beat him and hang him up and bring out the cattle prod and…  
  
Blair found himself shaking his head, heard himself whimpering, whining, “ _NoNoNoNoNoNoNo_ ,” over and over. He bit hard into his lip until he tasted blood, made himself stop. Jim would hear, Jim would hear and stop the car and…  
  
Blair’s eyes filled with tears of sheer terror, his nose clogged He snuffled and snorted, trying to clear his airways, breathing through his mouth. Jim would come and gag him again. He'd put a hood over his head. Why was this _happening_? The injustice of it - He’d done _everything_ they’d told him, to the _letter_. Even though it had hurt so much to stay so far away from everyone and everything he loved, he’d done it. For _Jim_ ’s sake, for Naomi’s, for his own. So _why_? Why had Jim turned? And why come after Blair, who’d never done anything but what he was told. Always! Always! Always!  
  
He bit down on his fear, breathed through the terror, fighting the desire, the _need_ to give in, to break down, dissolve into a shivering jelly of mindless terror and just take what was coming, because he couldn’t do that. For _Naomi’s_ sake, he had to be strong. He had to _think_ , stay calm, keep a clear head, find a way out. Running was impossible. If they were heading where he thought they were heading, there was nothing out there but mountains and forest for mile after unknown mile. Jim was tough, strong, pitiless, unyielding, and Blair was soft and flabby, hopelessly unfit. It must have been seven years or more since he’d moved at anything faster than a gentle stroll. If he tried to run, Jim would catch him and he would punish him and… who knew what else.  
  
Okay, escape was out. _Running_ was out, anything physical. He would have to use more arcane methods. Pitted against Jim Ellison, his body was a weak and feeble thing, but he had a good intellect and a way with words. Those would have to be his weapons. They were all he had.

The day was hot, long, painful, unbearable. Sometimes the road was pitted and pot-holed; then Blair was pummeled and bounced inside the trunk. His head ached, his bruises had bruises and he’d lost all feeling in his shoulders. The air grew hotter as the day wore on, until Blair was so starved of oxygen he thought he’d never draw another breath. That was when the panic spiked and he’d had to fight hard to beat it down. He wasn’t sure how much more he could stand. He felt like he was losing his mind. He was certainly losing time; minutes became hours, hours drifted into something like dreamtime, so that when Jim pulled off the road at some isolated spot, threw open the trunk and dragged him to sit up and drink, he didn’t know whether he’d been trussed up for days or hours or weeks.  
  
The water Jim forced down him was warm, it tasted of plastic and chemicals. Blair started to gag.

Jim forced his chin up and held his jaw closed, murmuring, “Come on, keep it down, Sandburg, keep it down.”

Even Blair’s stomach was too scared to disobey Jim: it stopped heaving.

“Good,” Jim smiled pleasantly, patting Blair’s cheek like he was in third grade and had brought home a good report card. “Doing good, Sandburg.”

Blair took a breath, prepared to speak. All he wanted was to ask how much longer, but Jim locked a calloused finger over his lips. “Ah, ah, ah,” he warned. “I told you, one word and it’s the tape. You want the tape?” Jim’s questions were never rhetorical, he always waited until Blair gave an answer.

Blair shook his head: no, he definitely didn’t want the tape. Right now, he was sure the tape would kill him. Jim grinned, nodded, and pushed Blair back down into the trunk.

He might have fallen asleep then, or maybe he passed out; the following hours left no stain on his memory. Certainly, he wasn’t quite conscious when Jim hoisted him onto his bony shoulder and carried him into another motel room, only distinguishable from the first by being even dimmer and dingier. Jim hurled his bag on to the bed and tipped Blair back on to his feet. After hours trussed up in the trunk Blair had no feeling in his limbs, his legs simply folded and he crashed down against the door.  
  
Jim stood over him, looking down on him with contempt, breathing through his nose, his jaw clenched so tight the muscles there jumped. His eyes were glacial, he seemed to be barely holding it together. Why was he so full of rage?

Almost too exhausted to be scared, Blair asked, tiredly, “What? What is it, Jim? Please tell me. Why are you angry?”

There was no answer. Jim just stared him out, shaking his head slightly, side to side as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. His face slowly broke in a disconcerting smile, a hundred times more terrifying than the stone-faced look of fury.  
  
“Jim…” Blair tried again. His voice sounded weak, pathetic. All his carefully thought out arguments, the finely-honed sentences designed to make Jim _listen_ seemed to have evaporated along with most of his brain cells in the sauna-heat of the car. Avoiding Jim’s gaze, he swallowed, blinked, tried again. “Just tell me. What did I do wrong?” It was the softest whisper, all he could manage. He made himself meet those cold, unreadable eyes, speaking fast and soft and panicky, stumbling a little as he tried to get the words in. “I know… I know I must have done _something_ , I get that, I do, but I really don’t know _what_. All I need is for you to tell me, Jim. Did _they_ send you? Because whatever I did, maybe… it’s something, I can put right. It’s not knowing, not knowing that’s killing me and I don’t understand why…”  
  
Jim moved so fast Blair never saw him coming, swinging him up, hurling him across the room so that Blair bounced off the wall and to the ground, so hard all the air was knocked out of him. Jim reached down. With one hand, he hauled Blair up until his feet left the ground.  
  
“Trying your tricks on me, Sandburg? You really should know better." Getting up in Blair’s face, so close he could feel the heat of his breath. Tiny flecks of Jim’s furious spittle peppered his cheeks as Blair tried to remember how to breathe.  
  
“You forget that I _know_ you, Sandburg, _intimately_ ; _Biblically_ , _outside_ , _inside_.” Jim grinned. “I _know_ what a slippery, sneaky, scheming little _fuck_ you are, so you can forget all those plans you’ve got cooking because it’s simply not going to work, okay?”  
  
Jim leaned in closer, pinning Blair to the wall with his body, leaving his hands free to reach into his pocket and take out the tape. Blair tried to maintain eye contact, maintain the illusion that he wasn’t scared, panting with fear and trying not to lose control of his bladder.  
  
“You broke the rules, soldier,” Jim said softly. “Now you don’t get to eat tonight.”  
  
He let Blair fall until his feet touched the ground, grabbed him by the throat and slammed him once, hard, against the wall. Jim pressed his shoulder to Blair’s chest, his thigh into his groin, holding him tight, leaving his hands free to snap a length of duct tape from the roll and fix it over Blair’s mouth.  
  
Blair closed his eyes and concentrated on sucking air in through his nose. The pressure on his balls was just on the edge of pain, the pressure slowly increasing, making him squirm, distracting him so that he was unaware that one of Jim’s hands had shifted, had found exposed skin and was pressing, hurting, the pain suddenly excruciating...  
  
Blair blacked out, just for a second, his whole body overwhelmed by agony. When he came to his senses he was curled on the floor, knees up, trying to scream through the gag. His muscles spasmed epileptically, uncontrollably.

Jim reached down, hauled him to his knees and dragged him across the floor. Blair found himself helpless, unable even to offer the slightest bit of resistance, his whole body shocked into agonized immobility.

*

Jim studiously ignored the stink of fear and urine. He ignored the helpless shuddering of his captive as he snapped a plastic tie in place around Sandburg’s wrists, bound in front now, then bisected that with a further one which he secured around the pipe which led to the radiator, positioning Blair to lie stretched out on his side, full-length on the floor; one small mercy, one he could allow. Jim headed into the bathroom and switched on the shower before leaning over the sink, feeling like he was going to throw up.

“Goddamn it!” he whispered hoarsely, sick to his stomach. Looking up, he met his own eyes in the mirror. The man who looked back at him was someone he truly hated, someone he’d never wanted to be: a human killing machine, acting without pity, conscienceless by choice, because to indulge any kind of regret at all about what he’d been forced to do for the past ten years would simply destroy him.  
  
The hatred he’d constantly nursed for Sandburg, the satisfaction he’d thought he’d feel at getting revenge had all-but deserted him. A big part of it was down to Sandburg’s reaction. Jim had wanted to break him slowly, to show him what it was like, what it had been like for _him_. But it seemed that, somehow, Blair was already broken. This was all-too easy, no challenge at all, and it made Jim feel like shit.  
  
The fact remained, he needed Blair compliant and controlled, at least until they got to the cabin, where Jim could finally deal with him in the way he needed to without being disturbed. In the meantime he needed him cowed, needed him to shut the fuck _up_ , because even all these years later it seemed that his voice was the one thing Jim had no defense against. If Jim listened, if he gave him so much as an inch, he’d lose sight of his objective. To him, Blair was just that dangerous, his voice a weapon, his words a weakness Jim could not afford to indulge. He could only pray that Blair had learned his lesson, because he sure as hell did not want to hurt him like that again.  
  
Mechanically he went through the motions of shaving, of showering. He went back out into the bedroom where, ignoring the stinking, twitching, silent body on the floor, he put on clean boxers and tee-shirt. Making sure his gun was safe under his pillow, he retrieved his knife, then went back over to where Sandburg lay.  
  
Crouching down, he put the knife down beside him and reached out. Ignoring Sandburg’s violent flinch as he made contact he deftly and methodically pressed _there_ and _there,_ and then rubbed firmly. His touch eased the painful after-effects of the pressure points he’d activated. But he might as well have been hurting him all over again, because Sandburg howled the entire time behind his gag.  
  
After he’d done he urged Sandburg onto his back. Blair’s eyes were wild and terrified and he was struggling to breathe. “Shh, shh,” Jim soothed, methodically wiping away Blair’s tears. He put a hand to the corner of the tape which covered his mouth. “I’m gonna take this off, but you’ve got to promise to stay quiet. Not a word, okay? Do you promise?” When Sandburg nodded frantically, Jim ripped it off.  
  
He allowed a few moments reprieve for Sandburg to gasp for desperately needed air, then took the other man’s face between his hands, and forced eye contact. “Listen to me,” he said. “You know the rules, and now you know what’s gonna happen if you break them.” He smiled. “So don’t break them.” He picked up the knife and cut Sandburg free, then hauled him upright before manhandling him into the bathroom.  
  
He made Blair shower, considerately allowing him to use lukewarm water this time. He made him brush his teeth, and stood watching while he struggled to pee, making a silent note to give him extra water to drink tomorrow.  
  
Sandburg trembled violently the entire time, his expression bleak and afraid, his eyes averted. There was no fight in him, none at all. It pissed Jim off big-time; made him feel like a huge fucking bully. Of necessity, Jim had worked hard over the last few years at sublimating any guilt he felt about the things he did, but right at this moment that ability seemed to have fled, leaving him drowning in remorse and mired in pity.

Perhaps that was why he was moved to show some mercy. After securing Blair’s hands back to the pipe out in the bedroom, Jim retrieved a pillow from the bed and put it under his head. He hadn’t allowed Blair to put on his soiled and stinking clothes, but he pulled the comforter off the bed and put it over him, tucking it in to keep him warm. Finally, he lifted Blair’s head and popped a small white pill in his mouth. Giving him a sip of water, “Swallow it,” he ordered.  
  
Blair did as asked without protest and shut his mouth once he’d gotten the pill down, his jaw clamped tight against any sounds that he might otherwise have made.  
  
Jim waited until Blair slipped into drugged sleep before freeing his hands and rubbing back some circulation, then tucking them under the quilt. Then he switched off the light and lay down on the bed with his gun in his hand.  
  
For his part, he didn’t intend to sleep tonight. Extending his senses he listened, searching for anything out of place, for anyone who should not be there. His intuition told him they were being followed, the same intuition that had kept him alive for the past ten years.  
  
He heard nothing as the night progressed. He didn’t sense anything out of the ordinary. He knew that didn’t mean a thing. His intuition had never once been wrong.


	5. Chapter 5

The next morning, Blair did everything that he was told, without a word or even the slightest hint of resistance. He ate when Jim told him to, used the john, got dressed. He allowed Jim to lead him out to the car without protest, and even walked around to the trunk by himself.  
  
For that, he got a reward. Jim showed him the roll of tape. “This stays off for now, but you make one sound, and it goes on. And the rest. You know the rules, Sport.”  
  
Blair shuddered, the threat of the tape nothing compared to the obvious dread that Jim would hurt him again. Doing so had been brutal and cruel, and Jim hated himself for having done it, but it had achieved the necessary results.    
  
After Sandburg was safely secured back inside the trunk, Jim got on the road. His sense of being watched hadn’t lessened, but he’d been careful, had covered his tracks well. He’d taken a circuitous route, and avoided too much contact with anyone along the way. The credit cards he’d used were undetectable forgeries, each one registered in a different name. This was the job he'd been trained for. He was very good at it, and was certain he’d made no mistakes so far. So why the hell was he so suspicious that there was someone on his tail?  
  
Absent-mindedly he rubbed the small scar on his neck where the bastards had implanted him with a microchip, which he’d dug out the minute he’d been liberated. If he’d still been chipped, they would have no problem finding him. No problem at all, because if one of them was chipped...  
  
One of them.  
  
Sandburg.

Shit.

There was a gas station up ahead, a small mom and pop outfit with a store attached. Jim pulled in. His heart pounded with dread. If he was right... Jesus. He was in deep, deep shit.  
  
The lot was empty. A hand-written sign on the door, which Jim could read from his car, said that due to a family funeral the place was closed until further notice. Was that luck, or design? Jim’s healthy paranoia was such that he didn’t believe in coincidence and never took anything at face value. Hefting his gun in his hand he stalked around the building, checking it out, seeking a trap, finding nothing.  
  
Breaking in was a piece of cake. To his relief, the electricity was still on. Getting Blair out of the trunk was the difficult part. He was disorientated, nauseous and frightened; not, all-in-all, the most cooperative combination, despite his fear of Jim making him more-or-less compliant in spirit, if not in body.  
  
Needing to get him moving quickly, Jim simply hoisted him over his shoulder and carried him inside. It was cooler in here, gloomily dark out of the midday sun, still hot, this far south, though Fall was well underway. Jim put Blair down on his feet and bent him forward across the counter. “Hold still,” he demanded. There was a barcode scanner next to the till, which he ran over Sandburg’s face and neck.  
  
Nothing.  
  
Hauling Sandburg up my the scuff of the neck Jim dragged him round behind the counter, and pushed him up further over the surface so that most of his torso was within reach of the scanner. He ran it over Blair’s back, hoping against hope that nothing would register.  
  
When the red light ran over Sandburg’s lower spine, it beeped.  
  
Goddamn it.  
  
Losing no time, Jim wrestled Sandburg onto the floor, face down, took the roll of tape out of his pocket and unceremoniously gagged him; there was no one around, so far as he could detect, but if Sandburg was going to scream he needed to keep the noise within acceptable bounds, for his sake if for no one else’s. He hoisted Blair’s tee shirt up, and drew his knife.  
  
Sandburg’s head was turned to the side, watching Jim bewilderedly. When he saw the knife in Jim’s hand he made a guttural sound of sheer terror. Ignoring his reaction, Jim immobilized him by placing one knee on his back and another across his legs, framing the area he needed to work on and pressing him down with his weight. “Don’t move,” he growled menacingly. “Believe me, Sandburg,” he said. “You don’t _want_ to move.”  
  
Ideally he should do this with something sterile, but time was of the essence so his knife would have to do. Running his fingertips over Sandburg’s spine he found it, a slight indentation, something irregular and an almost imperceptible scar. Lowering the knife he deftly cut a cross-shaped incision into Sandburg’s back, then dug in hard, levering out the subcutaneous object.  
  
It took less than five seconds to do the surgery, despite Sandburg’s agonized grunts of pain and futile attempt to wriggle free. In a pool of blood on his palm he held a circular, half-inch wide, paper-thin piece of metal: a microchip, identical to the one he’d been implanted with himself. He needed to get rid of it, and fast. But first, he needed to clean up here. Leaving Sandburg squirming on the floor emitting desperate sounds of distress, he pilfered antiseptic from the store’s small shelf of medical supplies and, immobilizing Sandburg unceremoniously once more, he poured a liberal amount of it onto the wound before covering it with surgical dressing and tape. Not the most subtle aftercare, but it would have to do for now.

He hauled Sandburg up and back outside and over to the car. Sandburg, it seemed, had rediscovered a bit of spirit. Digging his heels in, he fought Jim all the way, screaming all the while behind his gag.

Jim needed to get him back under immediate control, so he slammed him up against the side of the car. “Shut up!” he yelled, right into the other man’s frightened face. “You want me to hurt you again?” He shook Blair hard. “Do you?”  
  
Blair shook his head, eyes wide with confusion and pain, gasping desperately through his nose, the tape over his mouth pulsing in and out as he futilely tried to suck in air through his mouth.  
  
Jim would have spent more time impressing upon him the need to be quiet, with the end result of removing that damned tape, but he’d run out of time. He could hear an engine on the road, getting closer by the second; a big, heavy vehicle, possibly something innocuous but maybe not. He grabbed Blair and dragged him over to the trunk.

“Pipe down!” he ordered, after he’d gotten him inside. “I mean it, Sandburg. Not one sound! You so much as breathe loudly, or draw any attention to yourself, and you won’t be the only one getting hurt.” Then he slammed the lid shut, just as a big truck, bearing out of state plates, turned into the gas station forecourt and rolled in to park up behind Jim's Taurus.

*

Inside the trunk, Blair heard the truck draw up. When the driver cut the engine, the sudden stillness was deafening; he could hear a bird singing somewhere nearby.  
  
“Looking for gas?” Jim called.  
  
“Yeah,” the stranger called back. Blair heard the crunch of feet hitting the hardtop, the slam of the truck door. Blair weighed his options; should he ignore Jim’s order, kick out, yell as best he could behind the gag, would he be heard? And if he was…?  
  
“Me too,” he heard Jim say amiably. “Just been taking a look around, it’s all closed up.”  
  
“Shit,” the driver responded. “I got barely enough to make it into Asheville, if I take it steady. Have to fill up there, I guess. Sure ain't got enough to get to Knoxville.”

Blair didn’t catch what Jim answered, only the driver’s response, “Sure is some kinda hot."

  
“Sure is,” Jim agreed, closer to the car now.

"I ain't looking forward to that long of a drive without air conditioning."

There was a mild ‘thunk’ above him, the back of the car dipped: Jim sitting on the trunk, a warning to stay quiet? Blair heard the other driver winding up the conversation. It was now or never. He could hardly think over the sound of his own rapid breaths, the thumping of his heart in his ears. Jim had a gun and a knife. He could easily just kill them both, him _and_ the truck driver. Blair had no idea what to do.

He winced against the fresh pain in his back, the wound Jim had inflicted on his spine. Dear God, why? What the hell had Jim done to him? When he saw the knife he’d honestly thought he was about to die. If he made a noise now, drew attention to himself, would the truck driver even hear him over the ticking of their engines, the chirping of cicadas, the traffic on the highway? And if he did, what would Jim do? Blair might end up with an innocent man’s blood on his hands. And what would Jim do to Blair then?

When Jim cut him just now, it had hurt, but it wasn’t the worst hurt he’d ever suffered. Blair had had a kidney infection, just after he arrived in North Carolina. That’d been bad, the ultimate agony, or so he'd thought. But it was nothing, _nothing_ … holy shit, it _paled_ into insignificance when compared to whatever it was Jim had done to him last night. Blair now understood that Jim had acquired skills way beyond those of a former ranger and cop. It was pretty clear that Jim had become a highly skilled super-soldier of some kind; a ruthless, merciless killing machine, a virtual automaton. When he’d pulled that knife and cut into Blair’s skin, and when he’d done that thing to him last night, that thing that’d paralyzed him, made him spasm and clench and howl…

Blair shut his eyes. He was trembling uncontrollably. He couldn’t do this anymore. But somehow he had to, he _had_ to get his fear under control, it was his only chance.  
  
If Jim was one of _them_ , one of the watchers, then there was only one place they could be heading, and that was to the facility, the underground military complex where they’d taken him the first time.  
  
Blair’s heart began racing. He felt the familiar acid tentacles of panic wrapping themselves around his heart. He could not allow himself to be taken there. He’d barely gotten through it the first time. He couldn’t do it again. He’d take his own life first. And why? He still couldn’t work out _why_ this was happening. He’d done nothing wrong! He’d never once disobeyed their orders.  
  
And then there was Naomi, where did this all this leave her? Because Blair was beginning to wonder if Jim Ellison had been part of this from the start. They’d told him it was all for Jim, after all. Maybe it was Jim’s idea, a way to punish Blair for fucking up with the dissertation. A bizarre, elaborate way to get him out of Jim’s life completely?

He heard the truck door slam. The engine roared into life. The truck’s tires scraping on the loose stones of the parking lot as he turning back to the highway. The moment had passed, the chance was lost.  
  
Blair fought against the fear that was crippling him; Jim had him cowed and out of his mind with terror, robbing him of his ability to think and he _had_ to think. He needed to keep his head. How much longer would they be on the road? If he could just get Jim to lower his guard _just_ a little, then when they hit the next motel - or any place where there were people and phones - Blair could seize his chance, make a quick escape. It would have to be fast. Jim Ellison was a sentinel, his heightened senses difficult to evade. He was formidable and terrifying, a man who could inflict terrifying pain with a gentle touch. If Blair ran, he had to get it right first time. There would be no second chances.  
  
The trunk flew open. Blair flinched, he didn’t need to act scared. Jim smiled, reached in, ripped off the duct tape over his mouth. Blair panted in the cooler air, gasping with relief. Jim unscrewed a bottle of water, leaned in, lifted Blair’s head, helped him drink. Blair guzzled greedily.  
  
Jim flashed a quick glance around the area as he reached into his pocket and took out the now familiar amber-glass bottle of pills. “Okay, Sandburg, this is how it’s going down,” Jim said. “We’ve got a long drive ahead and I need you to stay very still and very quiet. I think it’ll go easier on us both if you take a couple of pills and sleep it out.”  
  
Blair just stared up at Jim, his mind racing, wondering what on earth was happening now. Had he left it too late? Was Jim planning to make the run all the way to the military facility, that underground bunker in the desert, tonight? Maybe he was heading to a rendezvous, maybe there was a helicopter or a plane waiting? Oh God, he hadn’t thought of that!  
  
Jim was staring at him oddly, he reached down a hand. Was he going to do it again? Hurt him again? A tiny whimper of fear escaped and he closed his eyes, bit his lip, braced himself for the terrible cramping wave to seize through every muscle, but nothing happened. Jim simply laid his fingers on the pulse point at Blair’s throat, moved them to his temple, looking at him oddly. Then Jim’s attention was gripped by something else. His head snapped up and he stared into the woods: his sentinel gaze, a look so familiar that Blair felt his heart flinch in nostalgic sorrow, a sense of loss so profound he wanted to weep.  
  
“Jim,” he whispered, chancing Jim’s wrath, a last ditch attempt to plead for his freedom and his life. Jim’s attention was all on him now. Was that a good thing, or not? Judging by Jim’s expression, not good. Jim reached down. Blair flinched, but all Jim did was place a hard finger across his lips.  
  
“Quiet!” he whispered, staring into nothing, all focus on his hearing. Blair fell still. He felt the hairs on his body rise, an instinctive, empathic synergy. Whatever had transpired in these long, lost years, there was still something working between them.  
  
Then Jim lifted his hand, shook out a couple of pills and pressed them gently between Blair’s lips. He lifted Blair’s head again, made him drink, then opened his mouth, checking he’d swallowed them down and wasn't hiding them under his tongue. Then he slammed the trunk closed, plunging Blair back into the hot, suffocating dark, started the engine and swung the car back onto the highway.

*

Jim drove for hours that day, changing direction several times, taking a circuitous route which took him ultimately in the opposite direction to that of his intended destination.

The discovery of the chip embedded in Blair’s back had shaken him badly, and he needed to put some miles between them and their last location. The chip itself was now heading south on the highway, deposited in the pocket of the hapless truck driver in a bid to throw their followers off their scent. Jim was confident that the driver of the truck was nothing more than an innocent passer-by. His senses had revealed no lies; nothing more than a regular guy who’d been travelling cross-country for an extended stretch, the cab and the man’s clothes reeking of sweat and junk food eaten on the road. If Jim had been in any way uncertain that the man had been exactly what he’d appeared to be, then he’d have killed him without a second’s hesitation.

Jim had given Sandburg a larger dose of sedative this time, keeping him unconscious for the duration, but he pulled over to check on him periodically, efficiently making sure that his captive had enough air to breathe. The pallor of Sandburg’s slack face needled at him during those breaks, his pulse faster than it should be while his body was at rest and his skin too hot to the touch. He was clearly not dealing well with the physical privation and stress Jim was putting him through. He’d been one of the most resilient people Jim had ever met back in the day, a tough little guy under the deceptively soft exterior.  
  
These days, it seemed, he was just soft.  
  
Jim shrugged as he closed the trunk once more after checking on Sandburg one more time. “Guess you’re getting older, Chief,” he muttered to himself, “just like me.” The old, affectionate nickname tumbled from his lips only slightly ironically.  
  
Afterward, back behind the wheel, Jim pursed his lips in disgust at himself. Jesus, it seemed that Sandburg wasn’t the only one who’d gotten soft, given Jim’s momentary lapse into nostalgic melancholy. He needed to focus, to hold onto his anger.  
  
The thing was, Sandburg wasn’t the only one who was having trouble dealing. Jim was struggling too, but in his case he was having problems maintaining his rage.  
  
One reason was that he now had doubt to add to the mix. Had Sandburg been complicit in having the tracking chip placed in his back? It seemed unlikely. This was the guy who used to declare his body to be a temple; who would wear subtle piercings, but never contemplate a tattoo because it couldn’t be removed.  
  
The more Jim thought about it, the more confused he became. Sandburg’s reaction, when Jim had cut it out, had been uncomprehending terror. He’d given all the signs of someone who had no idea what Jim was doing. But how could he not know the chip was there?  
  
Sandburg was just beginning to stir when Jim returned later that evening to the stationary car, the key to their latest motel room in his hand. Willing his captive to remain quiet for just a little while longer, he pulled out of the parking lot and drove up to park right beside the room they’d sleep in tonight.  
  
Jim took time to open up their room and take in his bag before coming back out to retrieve Sandburg. Blair was groggy and disoriented as Jim hauled him out of the trunk, but aware enough to swallow down any sounds he might otherwise have made, seemingly having at last taken all Jim’s warnings to heart. “Good boy,” Jim praised, as he half-carried Blair inside. “You’re learning.”  
  
Good behavior deserved a reward, so after cutting the plastic tie around his wrists Jim pushed Blair into the bathroom. “You have exactly fifteen minutes,” he said. “Use the john, take a shower, you can use warm water this time. Change into these.” Jim pushed a bundle of clean clothes into Sandburg’s shaking hands.  “Don’t waste time.” The bathroom had no external window, so there was no hope of escape.  
  
When Sandburg was safely inside, Jim cast his senses out, searching. He’d been vigilant during the entire drive, and didn’t think they’d been followed, but now they’d stopped moving he could give all his attention over to doing a proper sweep.  
  
Breathing deep, using skills he’d originally learned from Sandburg but had honed in the years since so that they were a thousand times more efficient, Jim focused, sending out his senses into the night; an infallible net of perception which spread out over the entire district, analyzing and dismissing multiple input, searching for the signs of surveillance and pursuit.  
  
He found nothing out of place, nothing he could identify as a potential threat. That didn’t mean, of course that he was safe, but at least for the moment their pursuers did not appear to be in the vicinity.

*

Shivering, Blair turned the shower to hot and sat on the closed toilet lid, waiting for the steam to warm up the room before reaching for his tee-shirt, wincing as the position twisted the skin on his back, a painful reminder that Jim had used a knife on him. His fingers found the dressing. He carefully probed the soreness of the wound beneath, it was shallow, and already scabbing over.

Blair had no idea why Jim had done it. That knife. God. When he'd seen it... The thought made him shiver, he couldn’t stop shivering. It was so hot in here, but cold too. Maybe he was getting sick? Maybe the wound was infected? He felt confused. Overwhelmed with sudden emotion, he wanted to cry but couldn’t, wouldn’t. He'd shed enough tears since this thing began. It was time to toughen up now. He wouldn’t give Jim the satisfaction. He knew he’d be listening with those sentinel ears, his hearing sharper, all senses bigger, better than they’d ever been when they were working together. When they were together.

Whoever had trained him was a far better teacher than Blair could ever hope to be. Jim had become… what? What _was_ Jim now? It was becoming plain that Jim was one of the bad guys, one of the men who had seized him and tortured him and threatened Naomi to keep him compliant. Always scared, always looking over his shoulder for ten long, unbearable years. And now this, whatever ' _this'_ was. And what had Blair done to deserve it? He’d followed their rules, hadn’t dared break the rules, but they’d come for him again, all the same, as he’d always feared they would. Worse, they’d sent Jim: the embodiment of Blair’s deepest, most secret longing, now turned into nightmare.

He had to get moving. If Jim heard him just sitting in here, he’d come looking for him. Blair didn’t want to make him mad. He pushed himself to his feet, aiming for the shower, but a sick wave of cold nausea sent him spinning to the sink. He took a mouthful of water, splashed cold water on his face. His hands were shaking, he was going to throw up. He leaned over and lifted the toilet lid, retching suddenly and violently into the bowl. Suddenly dizzy he grabbed the side of the sink for support. Bright lights flickered in the sudden dark of his vision and he was forced to lie down on the floor before he fainted and fell.  
  
Maybe he was dying. He kinda hoped he was. Better that than whatever Jim had waiting for him at the end of the road. If only he didn’t have to worry about Naomi, he could die quite happily here, on the bathroom floor, where the tiles were so deliciously cool…

*

Drawing his senses back in, back to the dingy motel room, Jim glanced at his watch. Shit, he’d been doing a sweep for nearly thirty minutes. Sandburg was still in the bathroom, he could hear the shower was still running.

Jim banged on the bathroom door. “That’s long enough. Get your ass out here right now, Sandburg. You have five seconds.”  
  
There was no response, and the water did not shut off. Decisively Jim swung the door open, but it came up short a few inches in, impeded by something behind the door. There was a pained whimper and the glimpse of a bare ankle: Sandburg, lying full-length on the floor. Pushing through the narrow gap, Jim took in the sight of Blair stretched out half-naked beside the toilet. It was clear from the stench in the room that he’d been throwing up, although to Jim’s relief he’d managed to hit the bowl. “Sandburg,” Jim barked, needing to get control of the situation. “On your feet!”  
  
Blair made as if to try, but it was obvious that his strength had deserted him. He stank of the rank sweat of the day but was sweating no longer. Jim crouched down and let his palm hover over Sandburg’s chest; he was cold to the touch and flushed with fever. Jim took him by the shoulder, trying to get him to his feet. Blair’s head flopped forward, long, grey, sweaty curls obscuring his face. He groaned.  
  
“Come on Sandburg,” Jim gasped as he maneuvered himself behind Blair, taking his shoulders, shifting him up to a sitting position. “You’ve got a fever; you’ve got to get up off of this floor.”  
  
Blair was boneless as a rag doll. “Please,” he murmured pathetically. “I’m trying, please don’t hurt me.”  
  
Swallowing down the unwanted emotions Blair’s helplessness engendered, Jim forced him to his feet and into the shower. As the water hit, Blair suddenly came back to life, his arms flailing at the spray, legs jerking, trying to twist himself free screaming, “Please, no more,” he gasped. “Please, I promise, I promise I won’t... I won’t tell anyone, I’ll do whatever you say. Please don’t hurt me anymore, please, please.” As his legs gave way on the slippery tiles and he all but fell against Jim who, in desperation, ended up stepping into the shower with him because he couldn’t see any other way of keeping him there, short of knocking him out.  
  
“Jesus,” Jim muttered, not sure who he hated more at this moment: himself, Sandburg or the other bastards who had screwed up his life. He forced himself to ignore Sandburg’s pleas, holding him under the spray with brute strength. The water was warm, but he lowered the temperature with one hand, using the other to restrain Sandburg and hold him steady. “Easy,” he ordered hoarsely. “Stop fighting me, Sandburg. I mean it.” When Blair’s panic showed no sign of stopping anytime soon, he decided to throw him a bone, just to ensure compliance, of course. “You’ve got a fever,” he said. “I need to get your temperature down, that’s all I’m doing here. Keep still, damn it! I’m not going to hurt you.”  
  
Blair was still babbling to himself but he’d stopped struggling, the fight going out of him and he sagged in Jim’s arms. “I can’t. I can’t. Please don’t do it anymore. I’ll stay away from Jim, I’ll stay away from Mom, I’ll do whatever you say.” A stream of nonsense, words born of disorientation and fever; a potentially deadly fever, if Jim’s internal temperature dial was correct, and he had no doubt that it was. And he’d aimed to do exactly this, hadn’t he? To take Blair, to punish him, to make him suffer. To make him know the exact same desperation that Jim had felt the past ten, unendurable years.  
  
He didn’t have to like it, though. Not when it was so goddamn easy. This was no challenge. This was no fun at all.  
  
Scooping cold water in his hand, Jim smoothed it over Sandburg’s head, through his hair, telling himself the gesture was not to soothe, but a mere practicality, to cool the other man down. “Easy,” he said again, as Sandburg shuddered in his arms. “It’s okay.”  
  
Blair was getting cooler now, beginning to shiver under the cold spray, and sense seemed to be returning. “Jim?” he queried, his voice querulous. Then, with the return of awareness, Sandburg belatedly remembered the stricture he’d been placed under. “I’m sorry,” he blurted out, his voice thick and heavy. “I won’t talk again. Please don’t hurt me.”  
  
“Shh,” Jim admonished. “Take it easy, Sandburg.” Judging the other man cool enough – for now – Jim stepped out and dragged Blair with him. Supporting Sandburg’s weight with one hand he reached out with the other for towels, which he wrapped loosely around him before hauling him back out into the bedroom and depositing him, unresisting, on the bed, patting him dry then easing him down against the pillows, covering him loosely with the comforter, already half-asleep, his eyes closed, his heart beating much too fast.  
  
Jim slipped out of his own wet clothes and changed into dry ones, then went to the bag for Tylenol and water. Sitting on the bed he eased his arms under Blair’s shoulders and raised him up. Shaking him awake, he urged him to drink and swallow the pills.

Blair’s eyes stayed dazed and far away the whole time. Then, as Jim laid him back down, he fixed his wandering gaze on Jim and smiled, a long, slow, sweet smile. He lifted one hand and laid it drunkenly against Jim’s face. “Jim,” he sighed, stroking his hand over Jim’s whiskered cheek. “I missed you so much.” 

“Sandburg, you’re delirious,” Jim said, removing Blair’s hand from his face, placing it down firmly on the bed.  
  
Blair balked a little when Jim made him turn over to his front, but settled down again quickly, apparently too confused and exhausted to understand what was happening. Jim took some time to clean and re-dress the incision on Blair’s back, satisfied to see that, despite the less than sterile conditions of the impromptu surgery, there was no sign of infection in the wound. This fever was something else then, a virus hitting when Sandburg’s defenses were down. Another indicator that Sandburg was not in anything like the shape he’d been when Jim had last seen him, if a few days of hardship had brought him to this depleted state so easily.  
  
Making him wake long enough to eat a piece of energy bar (he needed something in his stomach because of the pills, and Jim didn’t want him to throw up again) he forced Blair to look at him. “You get to sleep in the bed tonight, because you’re sick and I want you to get where we’re going alive. You give me any trouble, and I’ll lock you in the trunk for the rest of the night.” But Jim only half-meant it, and as threats went it was pretty feeble because Blair didn’t show much comprehension at all.  
  
After that, he went out briefly to the car to retrieve another bag. Then, keeping part of his attention on the sick man and periodically ranging his senses out and beyond, keeping watch for danger, he powered up his laptop and methodically accessed a number of secure sites even the best hackers in the business knew nothing about, seeking answers to questions he hadn’t - until he’d dug the chip out of Sandburg’s back - thought to ask.  
  
As the night progressed Blair tossed and turned on the bed, his temperature under control initially, thanks to the cold shower and the pills, but steadily climbing throughout the dark hours. Lost in fever dreams, Blair was unaware when, in the hours before dawn, Jim ran a cold washcloth over his face and chest, and was oblivious to the quiet, reluctant words of comfort.


	6. Chapter 6

It was the unaccustomed noise that woke Blair. So many days spent in near-silence, just the monotonous hum of traffic, the sound of Jim’s shower, a TV turned low as he drifted into drugged sleep. Now a scream woke him with a start, but it was a scream of play, not fear or pain, and there was shouting, laughter.  
  
He was on a bed; _that_ was new. He was warm too, snug under a comforter, and could move his arms, they weren’t restrained. He opened his eyes and saw a cheap motel room, the same as all the other cheap motels he’d slept in these past several days. The difference was his current state of comfort.  
  
He was tired, so he closed his eyes once more. He was sick, he remembered that. He still felt bad but he desperately needed to pee, so he’d have to move, even though he wanted to stay right where he was. It took a few seconds for his limbs to obey his commands, shifting first one leg then the next, placing both feet on the ground, easing himself up, closing his eyes against the wave of sickness that rushed up from the ground to greet him. Somehow he got up and made it to the bathroom, lifted the toilet lid, let loose with a sigh… which was when he realized that Jim was missing.

The shock of that was like a bucket of cold water to the head. He felt considerably more alert a moment later as he tentatively poked his head around the bathroom door, checking out the small, beige room, expecting Jim to be waiting, anticipating retribution for having gotten up without permission. Jim had never left him alone before, never let him go unrestrained, but clearly Jim wasn’t here. 

Blair tiptoed to the door and, finding it locked, put his ear against it, but heard nothing but the ordinary sound of regular people out there. He tilted the blind and glanced out of the window; there was no car in the lot. Had Jim deserted him? His bags were still here, Jim’s clothes were all here, _Blair_ was still here. It made no sense.  
  
He looked out again. Jim’s car was definitely gone. There was a family across the parking lot, packing suitcases into trunks, looking like a wedding party. They were the source of the noises he’d heard, as they snapped photographs, laughed and shouted, tickling and teasing squealing children who ran around the feet of the adults, yelling, playing, everyone noisy, everyone happy. Blair looked back into the room, confused and a little afraid. And that was when he saw that the laptop was turned on.  
  
He stood there a full minute, blinking in confusion, waiting for Jim to appear from some impossible hiding place, like Cato in an Inspector Clouseau movie, and declare this a test, a test he’d failed. He was just waiting for Jim to repeat that thing, that… whatever it was that Jim had done to him, the thing that made Blair shudder silently to himself whenever he remembered it; the thing he would never forget. When Jim didn’t appear, Blair tiptoed across the nylon shag-pile, his finger finding its own way to the keyboard, tapping a key, the winking red light of sleep turning to blue. An empty, cerulean desktop appeared: the laptop wasn’t passworded.  
  
Blair snatched his fingers away as if he’d been burned. This had to be a trap, it had to be.

He waited.

Waited.

And nothing happened.

Carefully, Blair sat down, clicked and opened the search engine, glancing at the history which hadn’t been cleared for the last search. It was like opening a laptop on the Marie Celeste, as if Jim had simply disappeared leaving everything as it had been in the final seconds of his life.

Blair opened Jim's search-history in tabs. Five tabs: one a Google Maps search of the Great Smokey Mountains National Park; another, a route map of trails in the park. The other three tabs contained news sites, all with the same headline: the killing of Martin Scott, a security guard at Duke University, and the disappearance of Professor Blair Sandburg whose office was one of those patrolled by Officer Scott.  
  
Blair found himself leaning back in the chair, away from the computer, as though he could somehow physically distance himself from what he could see on the screen. He was shaking his head, what he was reading somehow not sinking into his fever-dulled brain. The party outside was noisier than ever, car doors slamming, kids shrieking, someone was singing, a sudden breeze blowing across the room, stirring the short hairs on his arms before it stilled.  
  
Then the laptop lid slammed shut and Blair looked up into a pair of cold blue eyes.  
  
Blair slid from the chair, backing away across the floor until his bare back hit the cold wall. Jim calmly placed the cup of coffee and bag of supplies on the table beside the laptop before walking over to him, reaching out, placing a warm palm over his mouth and pinning him to the motel wall.  
  
Jim stared. Blair stared back, wide-eyed, deer-in-the-headlights and he knew, _knew_ how that looked, knew how weak he must seem, like he was begging for the bruising he knew had to follow. Jim’s stare was glacial, blue-ice, full of loathing. Blair knew he was going to be hurt and tried to brace himself for what was coming. He felt himself starting to shake. He closed his eyes. In answer, Jim took his hand from Blair’s mouth and laid it flat against his bare chest.  
  
“What possessed you?” Jim asked, his voice controlled and terrifyingly soft. “After everything that’s happened, what on Earth made you think that doing what you just did was in any way acceptable?”  
  
Blair ran his tongue over dry lips, opened his eyes, flicked a glance at Jim, who was staring him down, his face impassive, stony, unreadable. Blair’s own breaths were unbearably loud in his ears, the only thing he could hear.  
  
“You have permission to speak,” Jim said, with a terrible attempt at a smile.  
  
“I just. I just... wondered…” It was the first time Blair had heard himself speak in what seemed like an age. His voice was cracked and dry, rough like sandpaper. Jim tipped his head inquiringly, Blair knew it was a trap, knew some fresh horror was about to occur but was it worse to say nothing or to speak? Which would bring the worst punishment? It was impossible to know.  
  
When Jim remained silent, expectant, Blair found some words. “I don’t understand,” he whispered. “I never did, even… even when they first took me. I knew I’d been stupid, messed things up for you, with my dissertation. But what they did to me, and the rules they made me follow, I never understood why.” He knew he'd started babbling now but couldn't seem to stop. “I did everything I was told, I never… tried, to find you or Mom or anyone else. And I stayed quiet, didn’t tell, didn’t talk to _anyone_ , never. But I still don’t know why, Jim and…”  
  
“Shut up,” Jim said, a simple command, there no anger, no emotion of any kind behind it; it was a tone of voice Blair had learned to obey without question.  
  
Jim looked away, just for a second, a look of pure exasperation - the look of a stern father who’s just caught his grounded child sneaking in through the bedroom window – then looked back at Blair, the palm pressing against his chest clenching slightly, pulling painfully at Blair’s chest hair.

“Just answer me this one question, Sandburg.” Jim said, his voice quiet, menacing. “All those years, when I was living in hell, the hell _you_ put me in while you were living the soft,” Jim stroked Blair’s belly with his free hand, “easy life you bought with my freedom, did you even think about me, even once?” He moved that same hand, used it to pat Blair’s face, _hard_ , almost a slap, enough to make Blair wince. “That’s not a rhetorical question, Sport, that requires an answer."

Blair shook his head. “I wasn’t allowed. Jim, you know that, you know... I tried not to. I must have, I guess, but Jim, it was really hard not to… to think about you, even though I wasn’t supposed to...”  
  
A hand on his mouth, Jim shaking his head condescendingly.  “Uh huh. None of that. I asked a straight question and I want a clear answer.” Jim lifted his hand from Blair’s face. “Permission to speak.”  
  
But Blair said nothing, he blinked. He was confused and he was sick, his thoughts were sluggish and muddied; he wasn’t getting this at all. Jim seemed to be playing some game Blair didn’t understand the rules of, and Jim wouldn’t explain. All Blair knew was that, whatever he said, there’d be pain at the end of it.  
  
“I don’t know,” he whispered eventually. “I don’t know what you want me to say, I don’t…”  
  
Jim clamped a hand back over Blair’s mouth, hard and angry. Blair shut his eyes, and waited for the suffering to begin.  
  
“What I _want_ ,” Jim said, patiently, “as I thought I’d explained, is a straight answer to a straight question. Did you, at any time in the preceding ten years, give a thought to what I was going through? What you,” he tapped the side of Blair’s head with a finger (Blair whimpered, couldn’t help it, kept his eyes shut) “ _put_ me through.” He moved his hand from Blair’s lips to his throat, gave Blair a shake. “Look at me you little shit! _Look_ at me!”  
  
Blair opened his eyes, as ordered. He couldn’t understand what Jim wanted from him, knowing nothing he said would satisfy. He’d been in a situation like this before, and nothing had been the right thing to say then, either. A no-win situation, a question where all possible answers were the wrong answers. Nothing stopped the pain back then, no matter what he said, not until they were done. It’d be the same now, he knew, and he just wanted it over. He was sick, and he was tired, and he simply couldn’t do this anymore.  
  
“Tell me!” Jim demanded, leaning in heavily, making it hard to breathe, to think.  
  
But Blair was getting angry himself now, a strange, calm rage, borne of utter desperation, rising up out of some deep place he’d forgotten was even there. “I told you, man! I don’t understand what the hell you want from me! None of this makes any sense; none of it. They told me to forget about you. Not even to _think_ about you. I was never to contact you or Mom and I did that, I did everything that I was told. I didn’t break their goddamn rules, so why the hell are you doing this to me?”  
  
Jim just stared at him.  
  
Blair’s resentment, so long buried, found its target now in Jim’s threatening silence. “Was it you? Was it all your idea, a way to get rid of me?” He’d found his voice now, the sudden strength of it as much a surprise to him as to Jim. “Were you there when they beat me? Did you watch when they stuck the needles in? Was it you who laughed when I pissed myself and begged for my life? I could hear it, man. Hear someone laughing the whole _fucking_ time!” Now he was shouting, making Jim hear him. “Was that you, Jim?”  
  
Jim slapped his hand back over Blair’s mouth, slammed his body against Blair’s, knocking the breath from him, pinning him to the wall. Blair began to cry again, he didn’t want to, was humiliated by it, but couldn’t help it, he was losing it now. It was just too much.  
  
“Shut up!” Jim hissed at his ear. “You’ll have someone calling the cops on us and believe me, Sandburg, that is one complication neither of us need right now.”  
  
Blair tried to yell that that was _just_ what he needed, please God, let the cops come and arrest Jim and free him from this nightmare! But Jim was holding him so tight, not a sound escaped.  
  
Jim leaned in so close Blair could smell the coffee on his breath. “You _fucking_ liar. You fucking lying little _bastard_ , Sandburg. So that’s it, huh? You know all about what they did to _me_ , and you twist it all around and work some reverse psychology on me, pretending you’re the real victim, huh? Is that the game you’re playing?”  
  
Blair continued to scream beneath Jim’s palm. Jim was the liar! Jim was playing some Government-Army game, even though he, _Blair_ , had done all that was asked, he’d kept to the rules, he’d never stepped out of line, how would he _dare_ , when Naomi’s life was at stake? He’d lived a life of fear and loneliness and misery for _Jim_ ’s sake, for Naomi’s sake, and now, it was obvious, Jim was working with them and it had been a _lie all along,_ and none of this was _fucking_ fair! – Screaming all this behind Jim’s palm when Jim suddenly threw him back against the wall with such force that all the breath was knocked from his lungs. His head cracked back and he slumped down to the ground, trying to breathe and cry and protest all at once, and the only sound escaping was the faint rasp of his paralyzed lungs clawing for air. His face was sticky and wet with tears, snot and the condensation from his own breath as he lay immobile on the musty carpet.  
  
Jim slid down the wall to sit beside him. “Why’d you do it, Sandburg?” The chilling anger seemed to have fled. Jim sounded so weary. “I thought you cared about me, you know? I had my doubts, sure. When the dissertation crap happened, I wondered for a while whose side you were on. But I got over it, I thought it was just an innocent mistake. I trusted you. I fucking _loved_ you. But then you handed me over to them, along with all your research, as well as all those tasty little personal details you discovered about me along the way. Why, Sandburg? Were you working for them all along, or was it just that they offered you the brass ring when your job went belly-up?” There was no anger in his words, just tiredness, resignation. “Just answer me that one thing and I swear I won’t hurt you again before we get where we’re going. How far back in our partnership did it go?”  
  
Blair wheezed. Winded, it was all he could do.

“Can’t even do that, huh?” Jim said, softly. “What I never understood was what I did to you that made you hate me that much. I mean, I’ve been over it a thousand times these past ten years, trying to work out what made you do it. I know you and I didn’t exactly end on a high note. I admit, I said some rough things, those last days when it was all going to hell, but I didn’t think you actually hated me, not enough to sell me out. There was a time I thought we were actually friends.” He snorted. “I’m not gonna make that mistake again, pal. Not where you’re concerned.”  
  
Blair croaked, desperate to speak, still unable.  
  
Jim looked down at him. “What?”  
  
“Can’t,” Blair gasped.  
  
“Can’t _what_? Explain yourself? The famous Sandburg obfuscation skills deserted you? Wow. You _must_ be sick.”  
  
“Can’t tell you what you seem to need to hear,” Blair whispered. “Nothing you’re saying makes any kind of sense to me.”  
  
“Oh!” Jim nodded. “Makes no sense, huh? Well, you betraying me made no sense to me, either, but I guess it doesn’t really matter anymore. I hoped I’d get an explanation out of you before this thing ended but it seems you can’t even grant me that small courtesy. I guess I’ll just have to settle for revenge.”  
  
Blair swallowed, scared, still, but finding a harder edge to his emotions now.  “You’re working for them, aren’t you?” The words hurt Blair to say them, his fear spoken aloud. “This is all a game, before you take me back to them, right?” he licked lips, dry with dread. “You’ve been working with them all this time, haven’t you? _Haven_ ’t you?”  
  
“What the hell are you talking about?” Jim demanded. “You know exactly where I’ve been.”  
  
But Blair didn’t know, he hadn’t been allowed to even think about it. “You know who they are, don’t you? The ones who snatched me that night outside the loft, put a bag on my head, threw me in the trunk and drove me… miles, I don’t know where.” Remembered horror, given voice for the first time since it happened, erupted in a sudden flood of words. “They put me in a helicopter, took me to some place underground, filled me full of drugs and tortured me for _days_ and put the fear of all the gods into me until I promised I’d go away and take the job they’d set up for me on the other side of the country, and to _never_ see you or Naomi again, never contact you, never…”  
  
“Never _what_?” Jim demanded, leaning down in his face.  
  
But Blair was desperate and angry enough, now, to meet his eyes. “Never to live my _life_ ,” he said. “Only to live that _travesty_ , that half-life they gave me.”

“My heart bleeds,” Jim sneered.

But Blair wasn’t finished. “I gave up everything, _everyone_ that I loved. And I did it, man, not because they put the fear of God into me, not because they threatened me, that they’d take me and do it again, that they’d kill me, because the truth was, my life was already over. I did it because I loved you, and I love my mom, and I wanted you both safe. It was all about love.”

“Bullshit,” Jim snorted. “The only person you love is yourself. You eat well on the money they give you, Professor? Did you ever spare a thought for me, subsisting on basic rations in the desert while you lived the high life on their payroll?”  
  
Blair lost it. “You fucking, you fucking…!” Dragging himself up, leaning up against the side of the bed so he could look Jim in the eye. “You _bastard_! You fucking _bastard!_ What _payroll?_ I live off my goddamn salary. They gave me nothing, man, _nothing_ , but they took _everything_. My life, my freedom, Naomi, _you_. If I so much as thought your fucking name, they’d know. They know everything. If I make friends, socialize with other people, let anything slip, they’ll take her. If I break the rules, _any_ of the rules, they’ll take her, and they’ll hurt her, and they’ll kill her. They’ve probably done it already, goddamn it, because by being here with you I’ve fucking _obliterated_ the rules!”  
  
“And all to keep Naomi alive,” Jim said sarcastically.  
  
“Yes! To keep her alive, keep her safe!”  
  
Jim shook his head, a sardonic smile on his lips. “You’re so full of shit. Naomi’s dead, she's been dead for years. You think I don’t know that?”  
  
“Shut. The fuck. Up!”  
  
Jim laughed. Then, before Blair even registered what was happening, Jim had gripped him tight by his hair, hauling him up, dragging him to the laptop, forcing him down into the chair and banging his finger onto the keyboard, bringing it out of sleep. “Google her,” he snapped.  
  
“What?!” Blair snapped, rubbing a hand over his stinging scalp.  
  
“Google her, Google Naomi.”  
  
Blair looked at him, Jim’s eyes were angry for sure, but it wasn’t the cold, controlled anger of days past, this was a passionate rage and directed all at him.  
  
“Why?” he asked, suddenly unsure, not knowing where this was going, only knowing it couldn’t be good.  
  
“I’m going to prove what a goddamn stupid _liar_ you are, Sandburg. What the hell do you take me for, huh? An idiot? _Google_ her. _Do_ it.”  
  
Blair blinked in perplexity, gathered his thoughts a moment. He’d been forbidden this act, his web usage monitored to ensure he made no effort either to contact or to get any information about the whereabouts of Jim and Naomi, the penalties for doing so having been made excruciatingly clear. It was a difficult stricture to overcome, even under threat. His heart raced and his hand shook as he touched the keyboard and hesitantly typed in his mother’s name in the Google search box. He got 1,123 hits: the first seven were obituaries. Blair sat and stared at the page.  
  
“Go ahead, Sandburg.”  
  
Blair swallowed. He clicked the first link: the Albuquerque Journal. The story was over three years old.  
  
 _‘Sad to report the sudden death… Long-time Santa Fe resident… Casa Bonita Artist’s colony… Well known… Beloved benefactor… Long fight with cancer… Great loss to the community…’_  
  
He tried to read it all, but his eyes would keep skipping over the hated words of the coldly respectful, platitudinous report, constantly drawn instead to the photo of a woman he barely recognized, with short-cropped, iron-grey hair, a too-thin, deeply bronzed face, lined with age and pain. But the smile, the smile was pure Naomi.  
  
“I don’t understand.” It was all he could find in himself to say, his world tilting, he couldn’t grasp the meaning, none of this made sense.  
  
“You don’t understand?” Jim echoed mockingly. “Then let me explain. This,” he tapped the laptop screen, “confirms that nothing you’ve just said to me has been the truth. It tells me that I’m still waiting for an explanation for what you did to me. Does that help, Einstein?”  
  
Blair turned and stared at him, wanting to speak but words wouldn’t come. Jim’s face seemed to be dissolving, slipping under water. He blinked, felt the tears fall, saw them splash down on the back of his hands, everything slowed, like walking on the bottom of the pool. He turned back to the picture on the screen, the laughing woman, the woman who, the story said, had lived in Santa Fe for seven years. He found a fresh link, the same story but a different picture, same lady, same grey hair, this time wearing a dress of burnt-orange silk, a dress Naomi would wear, a dress she would have loved.  
  
“Keep going,” Jim said. “Long as you want, it won’t change the story. Your mom’s dead, has been for a long time so you can cut the crap…”  
  
Blair turned and swung at him. Jim barely dodged the blow, which wasn’t all that hard and certainly wouldn’t have hurt him, but was enough to unbalance Blair, and make him fall off the chair. Jim reached down and picked him up with ease as Blair screamed in rage and twisted and fought until Jim slammed him back against the wall, holding him by the throat while Blair yelled, “You _bastard_! You made your fucking point, she’s dead, my mom’s dead, but I didn’t know, I didn’t _know_! I followed the rules, but she’s dead anyway, so why don’t you just fucking kill me, man, get it over with! I’d rather die anyway than go back there with you.”  
  
Jim clamped his hand over Blair’s mouth again, holding him against the wall with the weight of his body as Blair kicked and fought and raged impotently until his strength was all gone in the sudden realization that it was all true, that Naomi was dead. However it happened, whether she was murdered or whether it was cancer that took her, didn’t really change anything because Naomi was gone, his beloved mom was gone, and there was nothing to do now but join her.  
  
Jim let go and Blair sank to the ground, lying boneless against the wall, shaking, not with rage any more, but with insurmountable grief, begging, “Why, Jim? Why?” He didn’t know he was crying until he felt the tears falling.

*

Jim stood, towering over Sandburg, who lay huddled at his feet. He had really lost it, crying and shaking, muttering about Naomi and asking, over and over, _why_ , as though Jim had somehow been personally responsible for her death.

Jim had monitored Sandburg’s reaction a moment ago, after he’d Googled the news report about his mother, and it had not been what he expected. Blair was genuinely shocked, and the suddenness of his grief was very real. That realization added to the sense of wrongness which had needled him ever since he’d found the microchip in Blair’s back. He’d dismissed his vague unease as evidence he was losing his resolve, and had made a determination this morning to be harder than ever on Blair as soon as he’d gotten sufficiently over his sickness. But now he wondered if he had been working on incorrect assumptions all along, and that there might be some truth in the rest of it: in Blair’s tale of being taken and tortured and coerced to live an isolated life under threat.

And that jibed suspiciously with something else that Jim had wondered about ever since he’d tracked Sandburg down. Why had Sandburg kept his own name? Someone as savvy as Sandburg should have known to change his identity, after selling Jim out. Had he been compelled to retain it? And if so, why? 

The fact was that Sandburg had been knocked sideways by the news of Naomi’s death, and now Jim wondered if he should have considered the possibility of Sandburg’s innocence earlier, instead of indulging in blind certainty of his guilt. Because of that certainty he had shied away, until now, from focusing his senses on Blair at all, beyond the absolute minimum necessary to keep him under control.

When Blair had spoken a few moments ago of horrors which had been inflicted on him – a scenario that Jim was all too familiar with - he now wished he’d observed him more closely. If he’d been telling the truth about that too, about being taken and tortured and coerced, then Jim might have been wrong all along. And if that was the case Jim’s world had just been turned on its head, rendering his actions and his treatment of Blair cruel in the extreme.

It made him feel like shit. And there was a surprise: it seemed that, despite how he’d been occupying his time these past ten years, Jim still had a conscience after all.

Perhaps Blair had kept his own name because Jim had been _meant_ to find him? Jim’s hatred of Blair had been nurtured by his handlers all these years. They'd reiterated, over and over, that Blair had readily given away his secrets and been rewarded for it. As a result, Jim had constantly fantasized about revenge, vowing that, if he ever broke free, he would track down his former partner and make him pay. But if none of that was true, if Blair was the innocent he claimed to be, then why had they done that? What motive could they possibly have had to turn Jim against him in that way?  
  
There was only one reason Jim could come up with: that they’d been playing the long game. That Blair had been set up right at the start as a trap specifically for him; a piece of unfinished business he would be certain to take care of if he ever managed to escape. That would explain why Blair had been chipped. The bastards had known he would seek Blair out, either to kill him or abduct him. They’d had an agent there waiting when he’d turned up, and because Jim had managed to overcome that obstacle they were out there now, tracking the chip which had been embedded in Blair’s back, waiting for the right moment to bring them both in. And Jim had fallen for the whole thing hook, line and sinker, blinded by nothing more than his own misguided rage.  
  
He was growing more and more certain that he’d been played by the minute, so it was time to confirm his suspicions and determine Sandburg’s guilt - or innocence - once and for all. Jim knelt down and grabbed Sandburg’s face between his hands. Blair’s skin was still too hot under his palms, flushed with the diminishing residue of fever.

“How can you not have known Naomi was dead?” Jim demanded, once he had Blair’s attention, focusing all his senses on the man, looking for the slightest sign of untruth. He was good at this, his ability to detect lies more accurate than any machine.

“They sent me photos,” Blair said brokenly. “She was travelling all over the place, different locations every time, but never in Santa Fe! They told me she was… she was happy. That she was doing okay. She looked okay!” He swallowed painfully, his misery clear. “They must have ‘shopped them. I thought… I just thought she looked good, she never seemed to age. She was beautiful, my mom. I just thought that was how she was.”  
  
That statement was true, at least. Time to push for a little more. “I can’t believe you never looked for her until now,” Jim told him. “Why didn’t you?”  
  
A big, fat tear rolled over Jim’s hand, part of a never-ending stream. “They said they’d hurt her if I broke the rules,” Blair said. “There were websites I couldn’t visit, search terms I wasn’t allowed to use.” Jim could clearly detect that he meant every word he said. Then Blair sobbed, “I never broke the rules, I swear. I swear, man. Not on purpose, never on purpose. They couldn’t know, right? That I thought about you, sometimes?”

Such a strange question. “Of course not. How could they know?”

“Right, okay, right.” Blair nodded. “That’s what I thought. I mean it’s crazy, right? So, they had no reason to kill her.” He sniffed, the tears still rolling down his cheeks, before glancing up at Jim. “Was it really cancer?” he begged brokenly. “Was she… was she murdered?” He sobbed again. “Did _you_ do it?”

Horrified and ashamed, Jim let go of Sandburg. “Of course I didn’t! What do you think I am?”  
  
Blair didn’t answer, but the look of mingled fear and distrust he cast toward Jim before he turned his head away answered that question quite succinctly. Jim bristled, but only for a moment. Blair was pretty much correct about that, he’d turned into something very unsavory indeed.  
  
Blair spoke again, exploiting the lapse in discipline by breaking the silence unbidden, increasing glimpses of the Sandburg Jim had once known. “Okay, so you didn’t kill,” he stumbled over the words, “my…. my mom. But what about Martin, huh? The security guard back at Duke? He’s dead, man. I saw the news reports. He was murdered. Tell me, Jim. Tell me you didn’t do it.”  
  
Jim shook his head, and he saw Blair flinch, clearly expecting to be punished for his presumption. He _had_ killed the guard, yes, and with good reason. Martin had been assigned to Blair, either as an ally (which was what Jim had assumed) or to keep him under surveillance.

Blair’s reaction to what he said next would give Jim the answer he sought, once and for all. “The people who took you, who hurt you, and threatened your mom? It wasn’t me. I swear to you, it wasn’t me.” He fixed Blair with his most direct stare, watching for the minutest signs of acting as Blair shrank back against the wall. “It was your pal Martin, and others like him.” He nodded, seeing the light dawn in Sandburg’s eyes. Jim continued to observe him closely as he went on. “You know what they say. Keep your enemies close, huh? Or was he a friend? You tell me.”

Sandburg’s reaction told Jim more than he needed to know. Suddenly Blair was flailing and gasping for air like a landed fish; absolutely no act, this, but pure, authentic anguish and panic. Not the response of a man who had been using the dead guard as protection, but every bit the horrified realization that the devil had been literally at his door and right up in his face the whole time.  
  
In a thrice Jim moved, his conviction that this whole mess was not what he’d originally assumed overwhelming him. Sandburg’s panic was very real, and while having him sleep through the journey ahead (sick as he still was) might be a blessing, hyperventilating was not the way he wanted it to be brought about. They needed to get on the road quickly and quietly (the commotion in this room might have already attracted attention) so Blair needed to be calmed down. Quickly and efficiently Jim prepared a syringe, immobilized Blair and administered it.  
  
After giving Blair the sedative – not a full dose, just enough to soothe him for as long as it would take to get them quickly underway, Jim took Blair into his arms, trying his best to keep him calm as Blair fought the drag of the drug before being pulled, inexorably, into slack-limbed semi-consciousness. “It’s all right,” Jim murmured, feeling sick to his stomach as Blair squirmed in his arms, clearly as terrified by his proximity to Jim as he was of the effects of the drug. “I won’t hurt you anymore,” Jim promised, knowing Blair wouldn’t believe it, hating himself for making it that way; hating the faceless men who had brought them to this impasse. “Hush, Blair, come on, you’re safe. You’re safe. Just let it work. That’s right. Relax. It’ll be okay.”

But he knew, as he hoisted Blair’s limp body into the trunk a short while later - padded now with a quilt and pillows (because punishment was no longer his aim) -  that safety was a luxury neither of them would be likely to know ever again.


	7. Chapter 7

Awareness came with the slowness of molasses. Blair knew only that he was hot, that he was sweating, that the air seemed thick and humid and it was hard to breathe. For a long time he thought he was home in bed, that it was summer, the thick, sticky weight of a southern August. He could hear the hum of the air conditioning; the unit in his bedroom had never worked well, tending to stick. He knew he had to get up and rattle the switch because it was so hot, unbearably hot and he daren’t open the window for fear…  
  
His eyes snapped open as he remembered. His darkest fears had already manifested, in the unexpected and terrifying form of Jim Ellison.  
  
He glanced around him. It was dark, but there was light behind him. His fevered thoughts slipped back, backwards in time, as he thought he’d left the bedroom blinds open for some reason, letting the sun creep in, adding to the intense heat. He tried throwing off the comforter, to get out of bed and cracked his hand painfully on some hidden obstruction. Remembering then, that he wasn’t home in bed; that he was back in the trunk. The light was coming from the air-holes Jim had made in the car and what he’d sleepily taken for the air conditioner was, in fact, the now-familiar, low hypnotic hum of tires travelling fast over tarmac.  
  
He lay back thinking. Memories struggled to swim to the surface. They’d fought, him and Jim; it had been weird and intense. Jim had stuck him with a needle, and he thought that Jim had held him and comforted him, but he was almost certain he’d dreamed that part, just wishful thinking. Then Blair’s heart lurched as he remembered Naomi, who wasn’t passing happy, healthy days in Bali, as he’d been told. Naomi was dead, she'd been dead and in her grave for three years. And God, it was hot, there was no air, he couldn’t _breathe_ , he couldn’t move. He started to panic…  
  
The car stopped. In the shock of sudden stillness, Blair tried to control his rasping breaths, the better to fix his hearing on the terrifying silence: panic intensifying as he heard the crunch of Jim’s feet on the stones at the side of the road.  
  
The trunk flew open, with a rush of icy air, freezing the sweat on Blair’s skin as Jim stared down a moment, then reached for him.  
  
Blair heard himself murmuring, “Pleasepleasepleaseplease,” over and over, a litany of whispered terror. 

Jim placed his forefinger against Blair’s lips, stemming the flood of panicked pleading as efficiently as if he’d flicked a switch. “You can sit in the car, up front, with me if you’re _quiet_ , if you swear you won’t make a sound or try to attract attention, if you promise not to give me any reason to regret it.” Jim smiled at him; it made Blair shiver. “We can’t draw any attention, it’s too dangerous, so you’ve got to promise to be calm. Otherwise it’ll be safer for both of us if you stay here.”  
  
Jim waited for an answer. Blair shook his head convulsively, more nervous gesture than reply, not really sure if Jim wanted a response.  
  
“Is that a yes or no?” Jim’s voice was terrifyingly patient.  
  
Blair didn’t know what to do. Speak? Not speak? He was so confused. Finally, in Jim’s continued silence, he worked out that an answer was expected.  “I’ll be quiet,” he whispered.  
  
“Okay,” Jim murmured, seemingly satisfied. Jim helped him to climb out; no easy matter, it was a deep trunk, thickly layered with blankets, pillows, the comforter – realizing as he struggled, that he’d never been allowed to climb out before, that Jim had always hauled him out like a piece of baggage, that his hands had always been tied. Why weren’t his hands tied, what game was Jim playing now?  
  
Jim held him steady, supporting him, making sure he didn’t fall. Blair fixed his gaze on Jim’s hand, gently supporting his arm. His thoughts seemed trapped in quicksand. Confused, he had no idea what was happening, but was happy to go with the flow, liking this gentler Jim, hoping he stuck around a while.  
  
Jim led him to the passenger seat, sat him down and strapped him in like a child.  
  
“You need a blanket?” he asked.  
  
Still sweating, Blair shook his head. Jim fetched one anyway, tossed it on the back seat. “We’re heading into the mountains,” he said. “You might need it later.’ He started the car. Exhausted already, Blair slept.  
  
When he woke again, the sun was going down. A single bright star was shining in a sky striped with red, pink and amber. The air was fresher, colder, the headlights lighting on frost patches at the side of the road. Blair remembered the maps on Jim’s laptop - the Great Smokey Mountains - a dozen questions on his lips but, remembering Jim’s admonishment, he kept them to himself. He had no desire to bring the other Jim back, even thinking about that made him shiver.  
  
Jim gave him a quick, appraising glance, then reached down and turned up the heat and reached back for the blanket, which he draped, one-handed, over Blair. After a minute, he turned the radio up, too, and Blair realized it had been on all the time, just turned down so low he hadn’t been able to hear it.  
  
They drove on in this way for a half-hour or so. Country music turned low, softening the silence. The car’s heater gentled the air with warmth and a faint burning smell. As they drove, the night drew on until the world outside the windows was swallowed by the dark, and there was no one and nothing but him and Jim and the comforting familiarity of the warm car. It reminded him of his childhood, sitting beside Naomi as they drove across the country, always on the move, always looking for fresh excitements and new horizons.  
  
“I’m sorry about your mom,” Jim said, out of the blue, making Blair start; could Jim have read his thoughts, some new sentinel skill he’d acquired? The man could see ghosts, it was in the realms of possibility. 

Jim cast him a quick glance. “I liked Naomi.”  
  
Blair nodded, grief nagging at him distantly, something to be dealt with at another time, or maybe never at all if this was going to end the way he feared. He wondered if he should say something, but Jim’s eyes were on the road and he didn’t speak again, so Blair decided to play it safe and keep quiet. Blair wondered how far into the dark Jim could see. He couldn’t see anything beyond the pool of the headlights himself, but could see enough to tell him that they were on a mountain road of sharp bends, treacherous drops and sudden unexpected trees. 

Eventually Jim swung off the road. He pulled on the handbrake, stopped the engine and killed the lights, plunging the world into darkness. It was clear, from the depths of the night, that they were a long way from civilization.  
  
“Stay here,” Jim said in the darkness. Blair nodded. Like he would dream of disobeying.  
  
Jim walked a few yards. Blair was all but blind in the totality of the dark of this place, but he could hear Jim’s boots on the gravel road. After a minute or so, he heard a hum and the clank of metal on metal, then Jim came back and started the car. They drove under a raised security barrier, then stopped. Jim got back out, did something at the gate and the barrier hummed back down.  
  
They drove slowly on, down a gravel road for what seemed to Blair like miles, eventually reaching a large cabin, dimly lit with security lights: there was clearly no one home. Jim paused at the edge of the clearing, keeping the car in the shadows, his head tilted, fixing his senses on the building.  
  
“Wait here,” he said eventually, getting out, lightly skirting the edge of the clearing before dodging into the dark stand of trees. Blair waited nervously, counting the seconds, not letting himself think too much about the changes in Jim, about where they were and why Jim was apparently breaking into a very well-protected building and what might happen once they got inside.

Jim climbed back in the car and _smiled_ at him. “Piece of cake,” he grinned, starting the engine and driving round to the side of the cabin, parking the car in the deep shadows of the surrounding pines. He nudged Blair to get out of the car and, taking him by the arm, guided him to a side door, ushering him inside, turning on the lights.  
  
As Blair stood blinking in the sudden glare, Jim opened a cupboard, revealing a control panel which he seemed to know his way around, deftly manipulating switches and tapping in numbers.  
  
While Jim worked, Blair turned his head to look at their surroundings. This was someone’s home or country retreat. From the look of the furnishings - the deep white carpets, the vast plasma screen, the high-end art and awards hanging on the plain white walls - it was someone with a career in music and a _lot_ of money.  
  
Jim stood, stretched his back, turned and smiled at Blair. “I’ve put my cell number in the system, fixed it so _we_ get the call if someone busts the perimeter and not the guy who owns this place.” 

“Who does own this place?” Blair asked, forgetting for the moment that he’d been ordered to stay silent.  
  
“Crispin Noir,” Jim grinned.  
  
“Crispin _Noir_?” Blair said, eyebrows disappearing into his hair.  
  
Jim nodded, still grinning. 

“Wow. I would have thought something a little more… _satanic_. More crucifixes, more leather, more _black_.” 

Jim shrugged. “Guy really straightened out since he cut his hair.” 

The surreality of it all, of Jim so uncharacteristically affable and this being Crispin Noir’s upmarket crib - he of leather pants and guyliner and hoards of metrosexual, teenaged raven-haired fans - loosened Blair’s tongue.  “Won’t he mind us crashing his pad uninvited, assuming we weren’t? Invited, I mean.”  
  
“I’ve fixed it so he won’t ever know. It has state of the art security, that’s why I brought us here. No one can come within miles of this place without my knowing about it.”  
  
“Okay,” Blair nodded, suddenly very tired and shaky, remembering something he’d completely forgotten in the tension, the excitement of watching Jim work. He was Jim’s prisoner.  Jim had spent the last several days torturing him, mentally and physically, and might have brought him to this remote, silent spot to kill him, or maybe as a brief respite before taking him back to the facility to be handed over to the watchers. Blair’s knees began shaking. He felt himself sway. Jim was immediately at his side, supporting him, leading him to sit on one of Crispin Noir’s deep white couches. He seemed to have forgotten his role in this play, too, unless this was all just part of the game.  
  
Jim let a hand hover over Blair’s forehead, and his eyes took on an intense look as he gauged his temperature. “You’re still sick,” he said. “Don’t want you dying on me, Sandburg, you ought to eat something then get to bed.” He stood, glanced around. “We need to find the kitchen. I’m assuming there’ll be something here to eat. If not, we’ll be on energy bars for the next couple days.”  
  
“I’m not really hungry,” Blair whispered, by way of a test, watching him, trying to work it all out, how he should behave with this changed Jim, what he should say or do to avoid his anger.  
  
Jim looked down at him. “You need to eat,” he said.  
  
“Okay,” Blair nodded. _Whatever you say, Jim_. 

A little while later in the spacious kitchen, Blair kept his eyes fixed on Jim as he searched through cupboards, trying to gauge his change of mood, striving to meet Jim halfway in this strangely incongruous normality. He was forgetting the rules already, the urge to make small-talk almost overwhelming. “I’m kinda sweaty,” Blair noted, sniffing at himself, horrified at the smell he found under his shirt.  
  
“Think you could you stand a shower?” Jim asked. Blair thought about it, then nodded. Jim nodded too. He reached out, helped Blair up from where he was sitting on a molded glass chair by the glass-topped table, and guided him to a ground floor bathroom with a fine, big shower. Jim seemed to know his way around; Blair assumed he must have studied the floorplans of this place.  
  
Then everything that had happened in the last few days came rushing back, turning his legs to jello. Suddenly Blair felt weak, faint, scared. “Jim?” he said. “What’s happening here?” Risky, but he couldn’t stand the uncertainty anymore.  
  
Jim glanced away with that exasperated look on his face. For a moment, Blair thought he’d pushed too far, blown it. He stepped back defensively until his back met the marble wall, but then Jim turned and looked at him, his eyes raking Blair’s body, as if he could see through the layers of clothing to the many cuts and bruises beneath. His eyes softened and for one, brief moment he looked ashamed and embarrassed. As fast as it appeared, the expression cleared.

Jim tapped impatiently on the door jamb with a fingernail and said, “Get yourself cleaned up, Sandburg. I need to shower too. After that we’ll eat, and when we’re ready, we’ll talk.” He smiled a little, a sad smile. “It’s gonna be okay.” 

*

As it had all the way here on the road, guilt consumed Jim as he searched for clothes to fit Sandburg from Noir's generously sized closet. Guilt ate away at him as he stood at the stove, preparing their meal (nothing more exotic to be found in this megastar’s kitchen than chicken soup in a can). He fully expected it would stay around a good while longer, become his constant companion, taking the place of the hatred that had previously been his closest ally.

He was a goddamned, stubborn idiot. He could have determined right at the start of this mess that Blair was innocent, his senses the absolute barometer of truth, if he’d not been simply too chickenshit to ask the right questions and monitor the answers. He didn’t know now which prospect had frightened him more: finding incontrovertible confirmation that Blair’s betrayal was true, or that it was false and his hatred was misplaced. That hatred - of the frightened man he could now hear fumbling about under the hot spray of the shower - had been the only thing that had sustained him for ten long years, his determination for revenge the only light at the end of his tunnel. It was a hard thing to let go of.

So now, with all his certainty blown to pieces in the light of Blair’s unexpected innocence, Jim found himself totally adrift with no clear goal in mind. He needed to change his plans. The only thing he could do - once they’d had a chance to catch their breath - was to get them both safely to the cabin. The cabin where… Jim’s mind shied away from what he’d intended to do to Blair there. The cabin would become their sanctuary, a place to regroup, to rest, and plan their next move. They’d just spend a little time here first; time to catch their breath. 

*

Blair stepped from the shower feeling more human than he had done in days. He was still muddle-headed and feverish, but clean at last, and smelling of Crispin Noir’s expensive soap, something pleasantly green and woodsy. He found clean pajamas waiting on the bed for him: tartan flannel – not his, they must be Crispin’s. Man, that guy was full of surprises. 

Pulling the clothes on proved harder than he’d thought. His limbs were stiff from days of restraint and everything hurt, badly. Checking himself over he seemed to be one giant bruise. 

He sat down on the edge of the bed and tried to think, to get clear in his mind everything that had happened. Why had Jim changed so suddenly? Become so solicitous, almost gentle? Maybe he was just crazy; all those years in the military, his time in Peru and whatever he’d been doing these past ten years, it had to have taken a toll on the man’s psyche. Jim was an amazing feat of human engineering, but he was still just a man. No one, no matter how remarkable they were, could go through a life like Jim Ellison’s and come out entirely unscarred. 

While grateful for this respite from daily punishment, Blair knew Jim couldn't really be trusted. He wasn’t about to let his guard down, or imagine himself safe.  
  
He padded barefoot across soft, thick rugs, finding the kitchen with his nose. Jim was putting out bowls of something that smelled good and savory, that made his mouth water and his stomach growl.

Jim turned to him and smiled. “Found some cans of chicken noodle in the pantry,” he said. “It’s supposed to be good for a fever.”  
  
Blair nodded silently, waiting in the doorway for permission to enter. Jim smiled, a little sheepishly. “It’s okay,” he said softly, almost a whisper. “I know you must be confused. I’m… sorry. About all that happened. I thought…” He shrugged. “There are things I didn’t know. I was… wrong.  In the morning, you’ll be feeling better, we’ll talk then, learn each other’s stories.” He gestured to the table. Blair sat. 

Jim poured juice from a carton. “There are supplies here, frozen food, cans, we can hole up for a day or two before we move on. I figured we’ll be safer here than practically anywhere else while you get healthy and we plan our next move," Jim said, sliding the drink across to Blair.  

Blair didn’t know what to say to him. He couldn't imagine he had any say in whatever it was that was going on here, so he kept his eyes down and ate his supper while his mind tried and failed to answer the questions that swirled in his still-feverish brain.  
  
“The pajamas fit,” Jim said, breaking the long silence. “Crispin Noir’s a really skinny guy, but I found some old clothes that seem about your size.” He smiled again, looking uncomfortable and uncertain. What was he so nervous about? Blair wondered again about Jim’s state of mind. He gave Jim what he hoped was a reassuring smile and spooned more soup into his mouth. The soup was Campbell’s, it tasted of childhood, of home. Sudden grief rushed over him. He let his hair fall over his face while he fought the tears.  
  
“Are you okay?” Jim asked. He sounded sincere. Blair nodded but couldn’t lift his head until he’d gotten his emotions under control.  
  
“Blair?”  
  
Blair couldn’t cope with the pretence anymore. “What’s going on?” he asked, looking up, meeting Jim’s eye despairingly. “I feel like I'm on a rollercoaster. I don’t know what’s happening, Jim. I...” He looked away, unable to finish, didn't really know what he was trying to say. He felt so sick and so _tired_. Like he might be dying.  
  
“Blair? Buddy…?”  
  
Blair glared at him. “Don’t. Just…. don’t, okay? You’re not my buddy. We’re not friends. Not anymore, not for a long time. And after… everything…” There was so much he wanted to say and couldn’t. Not yet. He just hadn’t got the energy for this, not now, maybe not ever. Blair closed his eyes for a moment and felt his head lurch. The stress; he was exhausted. He was practically falling asleep where he sat. Jerking awake, he realized what was going on. “You drugged me again,” he accused, looking at Jim in horror. He felt so confused, so entirely helpless: a victim. A victim for the past ten years. A mixture of emotions coursed through him. He knew he was at the end of his rope now; there was nowhere left for him to go.  
  
It was the oddest thing. Jim looked to be in the same emotional boat. Tears glittered in his eyes. That was how Blair knew he really was sick; he was hallucinating, or maybe it was the drugs Jim had slipped him in his soup.

Jim shook his head. “You’re not drugged. I swear. I won’t do that again.”  
  
Blair felt his eyes closing again. Was he really just that tired? 

"We've both been through a lot," Jim said. "It's the comedown. It knocks you out. It takes most of us the same way." 

Blair didn't believe him, but either way, he was never going to be able to fight the sleep that tugged at him like a lifeline. Against his will, his eyes closed again. He heard the spoon clatter down against the kitchen floor. Jim eased him up from his chair, then, somehow, they were in the bedroom and Jim was laying him in the bed, pulling a warm, soft comforter over him, resting a warm hand on his forehead. Jim spoke softly to him: easy promises of future kindness. All lies, of course, but there and then, as he slid into sleep, Blair found he didn’t mind.

*

Senses Jim had previously shied away from using on Blair were now turned on him in full, just like the old days. And his senses were telling him, without even the slightest doubt, that there was no duplicity in the man. Nothing there but pure honest fear, grief and despair. Jim understood those emotions. He understood them _very_ well.

The truth was, he’d been played, and the bastards had won again. They’d psyched him but good into believing their lies, and despite all the brutal lessons he’d learned at their hands he’d fallen for it hook, line and sinker. There wasn't a word adequate enough to describe how blind, how utterly stupid he’d been. 

Blair had been fashioned into bait to bring Jim to heel, and Jim had been thoroughly ensnared. But he’d gotten the upper hand, killed the bastard who'd been set to watch Blair and spring the trap. They’d grossly underestimated just how much force would be needed to bring Jim down. One man, competent, sure, but a million miles from how dangerous, ruthless and single-minded Jim had become. That was their first mistake.  
  
They’d probably assumed he'd just kill Blair if that happened, but the tracker had been implanted in him as backup, just in case Jim got the opportunity to take him alive and run. Bingo. He’d done exactly that. They knew him too well; of course they did, they made him, made this version of him. But Jim had the upper hand now, for a short time at least, with their tracker heading in a different direction.  
  
But. 

They'd been tracking Blair since he left Cascade. Until a few hours ago, the watchers could have picked them both up at any time. So why didn’t they? Why did they let Jim get so far with Blair without making a move? Run the risk of Jim finding Blair was chipped, as he'd been chipped, of Jim finding it and removing it, doing just exactly what he'd just done? It didn’t make sense.  
  
Holding that thought, Jim went to check on Blair, who was still sleeping soundly, almost peacefully. Satisfied Blair was doing okay Jim let his senses roam, casting a net around their immediate surroundings. Crispin Noir clearly enjoyed solitude. There were very few near neighbors: all the houses around here seemed to be vacation homes and all of them empty. The nearest human activity he could find was music and laughter at some hotel or country club, but that was far off, on the very edge of his now impressive range. When he filtered out the animal and nature sounds, there was almost total silence for a radius of miles that would make it easy to track anyone new coming into the area, any potential threat.

Finally satisfied that they were safe for now, Jim allowed himself to loosen up, just a little. Taking a Snapple from the fridge, he relaxed down into one of the rock star’s softly enveloping couches and switched on the TV, flipping through the stations until he found some news. 

His relaxation was short lived. Blair’s disappearance and the death of the security guard was currently the lead item on CNN. No mention of Jim himself, of course, it was in no one’s interest for him to remain anywhere but in the shadows. Blair’s face and Blair’s name, on the other hand, were now national news. His image was everywhere, and the portrait painted of the missing professor - of a too private man with a hidden dark side - made him sound strange and sinister, the classic loner, the quiet-man-who-flipped. Parents were scared; who was this dangerous little man who had been teaching their kids?  “He never socialized,” one worried looking colleague told the cameras. “He kept to himself. I didn’t know him well, really. No one did. I’m shocked he’s done something like this, but also, I'd say, I'm not surprised.” 

Blair was being set up as a murderer: a weirdo, crazy, a danger to his students and his colleagues, to anyone who might cross his path. "If you see this man, do not approach him," the cop on screen said. "Call the police immediately." Blair was now a very publicly wanted man. 

Jim had assumed the whole thing would have been buried in a pile of misdirection. Once again, the watchers had outplayed him. To say that this was not the game plan he’d anticipated would be a considerable understatement.  
  
He turned off the TV and cast his senses out again. All was quiet outside. Inside, the only sound was the air rushing restfully in and out of Blair’s lungs, a soothing counterpoint to Jim’s troubled thoughts. After one, last sweep of the silent perimeter, he took a shower and headed back to the bedroom where Blair slept on, a deep sleep unencumbered, for the first time since Jim took him, by narcotics. _“No more,”_ Jim promised silently as Blair lay there, oblivious. _“We end this, one way or another. I won’t let you be hurt anymore - not by me, not by anyone."_  

Feeling inexpressibly tender and protective, Jim climbed into bed beside him.

*

Blair didn’t know how long he’d been sleeping. It was dark outside and so quiet; still and silent, not so much as an owl hoot or a ray of distant, clouded starlight to break the velvet, womb-like shroud that wrapped him so warmly. 

Jim had woken him, slipping into bed beside him, scented with the same fresh, green soap Blair had used. Jim’s skin was warm and slightly damp from his shower and he was naked, Blair felt that when his hand, heavy with sleep, fell into Jim’s lap. Blair felt Jim's penis twitch in surprise. He shifted to his side, hoping to cover his embarrassment under the guise of sleep, but he should have known better than to try to fool a sentinel. Jim reached out to him across the cool sheets, found Blair’s arm and began stroking, a single forefinger, up and down, soft and soothing and disturbingly arousing. 

Sleepy and reluctant as he was, Blair felt himself respond, trying to resist, to will his rebellious cock to deflate. But it was so long since he’d had any contact with anyone sexually. So very many lonely years, and his libido wasn’t listening to his protests. Mesmerized as he was by the motion of Jim’s hand, the past and present tumbled together in a confused jumble in his head. The simple touch, so gentle and sensuous in the pitch-blackness of the room, made it hard to remember that the man in bed with him was an embittered, dangerous stranger wearing Jim’s face, and that they were not somehow back in time in their big bed in Cascade. 

The touch slowed and Jim moved closer, his arm sneaking around Blair, holding him close, reminding Blair of safety, feeling too tired now to maintain his erection, too lazy and warm and comfortable. Then Jim began to murmur quietly into the dark, like he was talking to himself, a soothing rumble. “I’m sorry, truly sorry for what I’ve put you through. They told me you were responsible for what they did to me, and I believed them. They made me believe it. No excuse, I know, I should have known you would never do that.  
  
“I always knew, deep down that they’d never let me go free and now I think… I think this was all just a giant set-up. I think they knew I’d find you, they counted on it, they wanted us together. I’ve put you in terrible danger, or saved you from it, I don’t know which. Maybe they thought I'd just kill you right off. I do know we’re in big trouble here and we’re going to have to think hard and fast, think better and faster than we ever have before if we’re going to survive and stay free…”  
  
Which was about the point where Blair, still sick and exhausted beyond endurance, finally blanked out. Telling himself, as he slipped into a dreamless void, that Jim was a skilled and seasoned soldier. Blair knew all about Stockholm Syndrome. Men like James Ellison were trained to work on a prisoner’s mind, make them believe all kinds of things, make them do things they didn't want to do. Telling himself he must not be fooled, reminding himself that he was still Ellison’s prisoner, that Jim was still the enemy and absolutely not to be trusted. 

But it was so very difficult, when he wanted so very much to believe. 

*

The first thing Blair noticed as he emerged into the light of a new day, was that he was warm, curled in a clean, comfortable bed under a cozy comforter. He opened his eyes. Beams of bright sunlight flashed through the gaps in the blinds, setting the dust sparkling and dancing. He could smell toast and coffee and, somewhere in another room, hear the low notes of a TV playing quietly to itself. For a few delicious moments, as he hung in the half-way world between waking and sleeping, he thought that he was home and a kid again. It was Saturday morning, no school and a whole, bright day ahead, filled with possibilities. He was safe and warm and loved, and there was Jim, in the doorway. Jim…

His bubble of contentment burst like a breached dam. He was Jim’s prisoner. Jim's punching bag. Jim's victim. Naomi wasn’t enjoying life on a Pacific Island, she was dead, and he would never see her again, never get to say goodbye.  
  
And here was Jim, in a towel robe that was comically much too small for him, standing in the doorway, smiling, walking into the room. Blair tugged the comforter a little closer, putting a few inches more distance between them.  
  
“I made breakfast,” Jim said, placing a glass of orange juice on the bedside table. “If you’re up to eating?” He reached out, let his hand hover over Blair’s face. 

Blair forced himself not to flinch or close his eyes, holding Jim’s gaze.

“Your temperature’s still a little on the high side, but the fever’s gone, “Jim told him. “Breakfast’s not much, just toast, there’s nothing fresh here, but I found bread and butter in the freezer. Found bacon, too, but it hasn’t thawed enough to use, maybe tomorrow?” 

He sat on the bed. Blair pulled the comforter tighter. “There’s food enough here to feed us for a while. I figure this is the safest place to stay for a couple of days at least. We might as well be comfortable while you get healthy and we plan our next move.”  
  
Blair knew he should say something. There were a thousand questions he wanted to ask but what came out was, “I thought I might take a shower.”  
  
Jim smiled, stood. He pointed to a pile of clothes on a chair by the door. “Noir’s baggy comfort clothes might fit you. I’ve put your own stuff in the laundry with mine. There’s nothing here fits me.” He pulled at the robe with a forced chuckle and a rueful smile. He was so tense Blair could practically smell it and trying so hard to be easy and comfortable and failing miserably. Jim sighed, glanced away, moved to the window, peered out through the blinds.  
  
“It’s a beautiful day,” he said. “Cold frost, blue skies, perfect. Though…” He let his hand drop, let the blinds fall shut. “You never were much for the cold, were you? Is that why…?” Letting the thought go unvoiced, he put his hands on his hips. “Look, I know, I know this is all confusing. We need to talk, right? And we will. Get clean, come eat and we’ll….” He raised his hands in a helpless gesture, moved to leave but paused at the door, turned. Blair had the comforter pulled up to his chin like a Victorian virgin. 

“I’m sorry,” Jim said. “You’re going to get tired of hearing me say that but… what I did. I’m sorry. I thought…” He shook his head. “Well, you know what I thought. Get up, get dressed. We’ll eat, we’ll... it'll be okay.”

*

Blair got into the shower, the wonderful shower with its powerful and apparently endless stream of hot water. He soaped up, Crispin Noir’s expensive soap lathered creamily on his hands and body and Blair took it slow, reveling in the unaccustomed luxury, washing his hair with good shampoo that smelled the same as the soap, biding his time, putting off the dread moment when he would have to step out of his room and talk to Jim. Now, when it seemed that conversation was finally allowed, maybe even encouraged, Blair seemed to have run out of words.

There was a guest-pack - toothbrush, toothpaste, razors and the like - in a sealed plastic bag by the sink. Blair shaved away the itchy, days-old beard, finishing with the rock star’s good cologne, enjoying the clean sensation. He couldn’t avoid seeing his wrists, banded with dark purple lines where the restraints had cut and bruised his flesh, averting his eyes from the full-length mirror. He knew what he’d see: a body smothered in bruises. Every time he moved, it hurt, constant reminders of the abuse he’d been subject to at Jim's hands.  
  
His mind tracked back over the time since Jim had abducted him, seeking some clue as to why Jim had suddenly made such a dramatic about-turn in his treatment of him and coming up with nothing. His memory seemed foggy, a fuzzy blank – he’d been sick, maybe he’d missed or forgotten something. The only way to find out would be to go out there and talk, like Jim said, but could he trust what Jim would tell him? Could he trust Jim? And all the time the doubt, that vague sense of something known but forgotten, lying in some dusty, unreachable corner, tickled at the edge of his memory.  
  
He'd stayed in the bathroom as long as he reasonably could; showered and shaved, teeth flossed and brushed. He’d washed and dried his hair so aggressively and for so long it haloed his head, a cotton-candy ball of crackling static. He leaned his hands on the sink, let his head droop, let the towel around his waist drop, took deep breaths. It was time to go face the music.  
  
The clothes were waiting on the chair where Jim had left them. They were just the kind of clothes Blair usually wore - old, faded jeans, plaid flannel shirts - only these were labeled ‘Calvin Klein and ‘Ralph Lauren’. The fabrics were thick and soft, a world away from the thrift-store and Wal-Mart brands Blair usually wore. Beautifully laundered and pressed with that special ‘clean linen’ fragrance he hadn’t smelled in years. He held the Calvin Klein boxers to his nose and inhaled deeply before putting them on.  
  
It was the sound of his own name that made him pause, turning to the door, leaning his ear, then turning his eye to the crack - a news story playing on the TV. A murder at Duke University: a dead security guard and a missing anthropologist - Professor Blair Sandburg - who had failed to show up after Fall break when the university, alerted by complaints of a bad smell, opened his office and found the body of a security guard, but no sign of a struggle and no sign either, of the missing professor whose apartment was found locked, intact and antiseptically clean. According to the building’s super, it was ‘like no one had been there for months.’  
  
There was an APB out on Blair Sandburg. Sandburg was wanted for questioning about the murder of the guard, Martin Theophillus Scott. There followed brief interviews with staff and students whose emotions varied from excitement, to tears and shock, and stiff concerns from other faculty members about the effect this might have on the university’s reputation. There was speculation as to whether Blair Sandburg had committed the killing and run, or if he’d been taken by the killer, if he might be dead, too.  
  
Blair heard none of this. He’d heard nothing since they gave out Martin’s name, which had flashed in his mind with the heat and light of a thousand suns. Now, he knew, he _knew_ what was wrong, knew why these doubts had been eating at him all this time.  
  
He needed a weapon. Something…. Noting the paperweight on the dresser, rejecting it. It was heavy, he could throw, was a good shot with a ball, but it was too heavy, its trajectory unpredictable. He needed something that he could conceal, and his eyes took him to the bathroom door, to the little guest razor, not the one he’d used, the other one, the one still sealed in its wrapper. There was a jar of bath crystals, good and heavy. He squatted on the cold floor and used it to quietly crush the cheap plastic and extract the metal, picking the blades off the tile floor. Whoa, sharp! He licked the bead of blood from his thumb, standing then, to press the blades into the bar of Crispin Noir’s delicious soap, wrapping the wet, slippery bar in toilet tissue for grip, hefting it in his hand. How easy it was to improvise a weapon. He was amazed he hadn’t thought of it before. 

*

Things being what they were, Jim decided to accord Blair some privacy now that matters had changed between them. He listened only long enough to hear the shower cut off, followed by Blair’s nervous movements as he shuffled hesitantly around in the bedroom, before reeling in his hearing. He was relieved to hear that, despite Blair’s obvious jumpiness, he didn’t seem to be paralyzed with fear anymore. No longer on the verge of an epic breakdown brought on by Jim’s treatment of him and his already no-doubt fragile state. Despite all of it, his resilience was still intact. That didn’t ease Jim’s guilt, but it did at least give him hope that Blair could recover from this whole mess, given time and distance. And wasn’t that the kicker. Here Jim was, doing their work for them. Terrorizing an innocent man: a man whose life had been ruined just as much as Jim’s, for all that his cage had been padded with a cruel parody of home comfort instead of enforced lessons in subterfuge and brutality. 

It seemed unreal to Jim, after the life he’d lived for the past ten years, to be pottering around in Crispin Noir’s well-appointed kitchen, making breakfast for the two of them. The TV droned on in the background, a comforting, familiar sound that added to the false sense of homeliness as he made coffee and put bread in the toaster, ready to go as soon as Blair emerged. 

The illusion of domesticity was disrupted when, once again, the news report that had been showing every hour on the hour started up again, Blair’s solemn face, the picture from his ID, flashing on the screen. Blair’s disappearance and the death of the so-called security guard had resulted in immense speculation as to why a nondescript professor had disappeared leaving a dead body in his office. No one they interviewed seemed to know Blair very well at all, the words ‘quiet’, ‘shy’ and ‘reclusive’ constantly repeated, graphically underlining the changes that circumstance had wrought on a man Jim remembered as being the complete opposite. 

The prominent, repeated airtime was, Jim absolutely understood, deliberate. ‘News’ was just another word for ‘propaganda’, and this hourly bulletin had an underlying purpose beyond keeping the populace informed. It was, as so many news reports were, a smokescreen, to hide the dirty truth from Joe Public: a dirty truth that Jim was intimately familiar with. 

It was also a way of rooting them out. Because Jim had abducted Blair instead of killing him, it had clearly been a scenario they'd planned for: that the two of them would team up and attempt to escape together. Plastering Blair’s face all over the media might result in somebody recognizing him and turning them in. That was the one, small positive of Jim's nefarious plans for Blair: since they’d been on the road no one had seen Blair at all, since he'd spent virtually the entire journey trussed up in the trunk of the Taurus. 

A sound behind him alerted Jim: Blair coming out of the bathroom. Without turning, Jim tried for the most unthreatening, neutral tone he could manage. “Help yourself to coffee,” he said. “I’ll get the...” 

He never completed the sentence. Something made him turn, made him duck, the same intangible sixth sense that had kept him alive for so long. An edge of clean, sweet-smelling sharpness cleaved the air inches from his face. Jim twisted, instinctively shifting into a defensive position that would set him up, in the next second, for an offensive maneuver that would take his opponent out in one single, deadly strike. 

He aborted the killing move in the next second when he saw who his attacker was. “What the hell, Sandburg?” Jim hadn’t expected for one moment that Blair would attack him, no matter how desperate he’d become. Had he simply pushed him too far? 

Blair, however, didn’t hesitate. A calm, deadly focused expression was on his face as he closed in on Jim once more, taking advantage of his astonishment. The absolute, committed determination in his bearing left Jim in no doubt that Blair intended to kill him. 

Jim’s single moment of hesitation had already been enough to cause damage, the makeshift blade in Blair’s hand sliced through his protectively raised forearm as he backed away, blood splattering like raindrops across Crispin Noir’s spotless white tiled floor and hardwood surfaces. 

Blair pressed his advantage. His movements were practiced and smooth, entirely unlike those of the frightened, ineffectual man Jim had been dealing with until now, his expression dispassionate and fixed on his target with clear, deadly purpose. Jim had time to register only that much before his instincts, honed on the whetstone of ten unendurable years came to the fore. Holding tight to his forearm to staunch the blood he kicked out hard, his outstretched foot connecting with Blair’s knee with an agonizing crunch. 

If Jim had gotten the angle right Sandburg’s kneecap would have shattered. His aim was a little off, so that didn’t happen, but the blow was more than enough to knock Sandburg to the floor. Even lacking the momentum to do long-lasting damage the kick should have incapacitated Blair or at the very least left him screaming in agony, but to Jim’s astonishment the pain didn’t seem to register at all. Blair didn’t even drop his weapon, but got right back on his feet. 

“Son of a bitch,” Jim muttered, dismayed to discover that his initial assumptions about Sandburg had been correct all along. The way Blair moved as he came toward him betrayed evidence of the same kind of training Jim had been subjected to, the same economy of movement and unerring purpose. 

Jim was preparing to take him down once and for all when Sandburg abruptly halted in his tracks. Confusion rippled across his face. He shook his head, blinked rapidly, the improvised weapon – a bar of soap encrusted with razor blades, Jim now saw – slid from his fingers and landed with a wet thud at his feet. Sandburg groaned, cramped fingers opening and closing, shifting his weight to favor his injured knee. His eyes sought Jim’s in frightened confusion, muttering incoherently - “Whu… what?” - like he’d just woken from a deep sleep. 

On the TV, Jim was peripherally aware that the news report about Blair had started playing again. “… Professor Sandburg has not been seen since, and police have linked his disappearance to the tragic death of Martin Theophillus Scott, aged 47, a security guard whose body was discovered in Sandburg’s locked office two days ago. A police spokesman indicated that…” 

Blair’s confused expression morphed seamlessly from wrinkled incomprehension to calm determination, his sagging stance transformed in an instant to efficiency as he swooped his arm down to retrieve his weapon. 

It was an epiphany: abruptly, Jim knew _exactly_ what was going on. 

Launching himself bodily at the other man Jim knocked him forcefully backwards, the deadly bar of soap skidding across the floor as it was knocked from Blair’s grasp. They landed heavily together. Jim felt fingers scrabble to close on his throat, Blair’s determination to attack him with deadly force apparently undiminished even with the heavier man atop him on the kitchen floor. Not giving Blair a chance to get any real purchase, and without the leisure for finesse, Jim utilized a tried and tested technique that had worked for him on many an occasion before: a good old fashioned roundhouse punch. 

It put Sandburg out like a light.


	8. Chapter 8

Blair opened his eyes. Confused, trying to make sense of his surroundings, finding himself on a bed, looking at a wall: a wall made of logs. His eyes tracked up to the ceiling. More logs. A cabin. Very rustic. 

Vague memories intruded then, muddled and mixed. He'd been back in Jim’s trunk - or had he? Vague, disassembled shards of memory had detached themselves from the timeline. But he was sure he remembered being back in the dark, the sickly smell of gas and rubber, the occasional, blissful breeze from the holes in the trunk, the scent of the forest. He remembered, too, the terror that Jim was going to kill him and bury him somewhere, taking him deep into the woods to throw him in a shallow grave. 

Memories flashed in broken pieces. Lying in the dark, his hands and feet bound, trussed up and cramping in pain. He was still tied now, stretched out on a bed. His hands, extended above his head, felt swollen, the sharp agony in his wrists faded now to something like toothache: old pain. Not the worst pain, though. That had been when Jim had done something to him, something terrifying… but where? A motel, he thought. But the details were gone. 

He shifted his weight to try to gain some relief, crying out in agony. That was new. His knee hurt like hell. When did he hurt his knee? Jim had done it. Jim’s change of mood at Crispin Noir’s place had all been a ruse. 

A noise. He turned slowly, an accompanying flash of pain in his head, like the worst hangover (drugs, his mind supplied. Again). A pair of long legs in faded jeans, standing beside the bed. He felt himself begin to shake. He didn’t want to, tried not to, but couldn’t help it. 

Jim crouched down beside him. Blair shut his eyes, tried to keep breathing, tried to get himself under control. He couldn’t do it. Jim didn’t speak, why didn’t he speak? Blair tried to open his eyes, but he couldn’t do that, either, just lay trembling, trying to breathe, trying not to have a heart attack. 

Jim touched him. Blair yelled in fright, his eyes flew open. Jim, holding an old bandanna. Without a word, he stuffed it into Blair’s mouth, then quietly, efficiently, gagged him with the last of the duct tape. 

*

Jim could not afford to let Blair’s obvious terror eat at him or distract him in any way. He had to do this, and he had to do it _right_. 

Blair was an unexploded bomb right now. If the correct triggers were applied, the result would be like lighting a fuse. Jim was pretty sure what this particular trigger had been, and he knew how to deal with it, having been party to this same process many times before. His main concern was the possibility of other mines lurking in the depths of Blair’s psyche. In this instance, the buried command had obviously been to kill Jim. What would it take to make Blair do harm to others, or maybe himself? 

The lessons in high-tech espionage and intelligence gathering that Jim had learned, hard-won though they were, served his purpose now. This cabin, which Jim had painstakingly set up and outfitted once he’d committed himself to abducting Blair, presented no issues in connecting to the internet, despite its remote location. It was equipped with state-of-the-art equipment, most of it immeasurably more advanced than was available to the general populace - just more evidence of the conspiracy intent on keeping the public blind and ignorant, limiting knowledge of developments that had been the norm in the intelligence community for _years_. 

Opening the laptop he’d brought into the room with him, Jim located one of the streaming websites that had been constantly showing the news of Blair’s disappearance, and whacked up the volume. 

Blair made a startled sound behind his gag and squirmed in his bonds on the bed, clearly confused and very, very frightened. But Jim could not afford to offer reassurance. Instead, he watched closely, listening to the news broadcast and noting the exact second that Blair’s consciousness slipped away, to be replaced by that of a mindless automaton intent on one single course of action. Now, Blair struggled against the restraints for a different reason: his enemy was there, right _there_ in front of him, and he’d been commanded to _kill_. 

It had been the sudden shift from blank-faced assassin to incomprehension and back again that clued Jim into the fact that Blair had been brainwashed. Now he’d narrowed down the cause, it was up to Jim to home in on it and unpick the conditioning. Selecting a syringe that he’d prepared earlier, Jim injected the drug into Sandburg’s arm. It took maybe sixty seconds for sense to return. Blair whimpered in terror as he came back to himself, sucking hard against the tape covering his mouth, breathing in frightened little puffs of air through his nose. 

Leaning in close, Jim said clearly, “Theophillus.” 

There was no change in Blair’s terrified demeanor, just as Jim had assumed would be the case. Triggers were rarely formed of a single word, as the chance of it being uttered randomly was too high. Instead, they were usually formed of a combination of incongruously juxtaposed stimuli, like a particular musical frequency combined with an image, or a string of words spoken in a specific order. 

Leaning in once more, he said, “Martin Theophillus Scott.” And nodded in satisfaction when Blair’s expression changed, and he struggled once more to launch an attack, thwarted only by the secure restraints that held him immobile. 

Jim leaned back away from the bed, and rubbed the back of his neck. He was tired, too tired for this. He was going to have to use every weapon in his arsenal to de-program Blair. His enemies – _their_ enemies – had kept them both at their mercy for years. Who knew how deep this went? 

*

The dawn of another day, and Jim woke with a start. It was a measure of his exhaustion that, instead of slipping into instant alert-mode (as had been the norm these past few years), he struggled for a few moments to remember where he was. 

Remembering, relaxing, he settled back as best he could in his uncomfortable position against the musty cushions of the old armchair, realizing it was the sound of Blair stirring in the other room that had woken him. Surely he’d only left him deep in sleep a few minutes ago? He checked his watch. Seven hours: it had been seven hours since he’d left Blair sleeping and allowed himself to rest a while. He’d fallen asleep himself. That was careless, he must have been more tired than he’d thought. He listened, checked Blair’s breathing: the kid was frightened and confused, but not panicked. He’d be okay for a little while yet. 

‘The kid’. That was what he’d used to call Blair, wasn’t it? Back then in that other life. Blair was no kid now. The gray hair was still a shock to Jim. Blair wasn’t old, the familiar features, when slack with sleep, were still youthful, but the hair still threw Jim for a loop every time he saw it. It was the ultimate evidence that Blair had gotten old before his time, living in stress and fear and forced into a half-life that, for a man as garrulous as the one Jim had known, had been nothing less than barbarity. Jim sighed, shifted. He ached; he was no spring chicken himself, and it showed. The years had not been kind to either of them, and no wonder. 

Jim eased himself up in his seat, feeling every one of his fifty-two years. He rubbed his eyes, which were scratchy with fatigue. His muscles cramped, he was worn out, exhausted. He hadn’t allowed himself to feel any fatigue until he was certain that every trace of Blair’s conditioning was fully broken. It had taken hours. Once it was done, he’d been tempted to place further suggestions: that Blair forget the torture, forget the ordeal Jim had put him through as well. That he cease to be afraid of Jim. That he trust Jim and admire him, like he’d used to. That he _forgive_ him. 

With the right combination of drugs and psychological manipulation, Jim could have easily done it; it was what he'd been trained for, after all. But Blair had been fucked with enough already, and he couldn’t bring himself to go through with it. Blair had always been tough – far tougher than his recent demeanor would lead anyone to believe. He was strong enough to get through this, but unless he came through it naturally, in his own time, Jim believed that he’d never fully recover.

Above all, Jim didn’t want to take anything from Blair that he hadn’t earned. He absolutely deserved Blair’s anger and distrust, but Blair’s understanding and forgiveness were things he’d most likely forfeited forever, and no amount of planted suggestions could ever make that right. Jim would just have to live with the consequences of what he’d done.

Blair had been fashioned into bait and honed as a weapon, as though he had no worth as a human being beyond his use as a tool for _them_ , the watchers. Blair had been the perfect lure to bring Jim in and destroy him, should he ever turn against them. It was an ingenious plan, which had very nearly succeeded. 

The reason Blair had been so compliant with the wishes of his captors was due to suggestions that had been planted, and which Jim had now dismantled. Blair had absolutely believed that his every move was being watched; which to some extent it was, as evidenced by Martin Scott’s presence. But to avoid even _thinking_ about forbidden topics for fear of what might happen? To believe that his internet usage was so closely monitored that one single slip would result in dire consequences? To be taken in by badly photoshopped pictures of his never-aging mother? The Blair Jim had once known would never have been deceived by any of that, and would have found ways to circumvent the restrictions placed upon him. 

But Blair had been conditioned to believe it absolutely, and so he had done exactly what he had been told, never once trying to seek news of his loved ones, never talking to other human beings beyond the bare minimum to allow him to do his job and survive. No friends, no hobbies, nothing but an empty existence divided between his office at the university and his dingy apartment. Unknowingly waiting, all the time, for Jim to come find him, so that he could be either the means of his capture or the instrument of his destruction. 

Jim had spent a lot of time exploring Blair’s psyche, seeking and dismantling every single trap that had been placed there by their enemies. The knowledge of what they’d done to him infused Jim with an anger the like of which he’d never felt before. The torture had been bad enough, as had been the life he’d been forced to lead and their attempt to fashion him into Jim’s nemesis, but the callousness of Blair’s intended death was the thing that turned Jim’s stomach. If Blair had managed to get the drop on Jim and kill him, a further compulsion, more brutal by far, would have kicked in.

Jim almost had to admire the deviousness of it. He supposed that there was no better way to demonstrate that the missing professor had gone off the rails than to have him strap himself to a shitload of explosives and detonate the bomb in a crowded city street. As smokescreens went, that one was a doozy.

Last night, when he’d finished his painstaking work, Jim had reached out a hand and gently smoothed his palm across Blair’s sleeping brow. “It’s over now, Chief," he’d whispered. “They can’t hurt you anymore.” Jim had known that Blair couldn’t hear him but he’d needed to hear the words himself, maybe then he’d believe it. 

Of course, in the clear light of day, Jim knew that he couldn’t promise any such thing. They could still hurt Blair and, given the chance, they’d kill him. Blair had failed in his purpose. He was expendable, a dead man, if they got their hands on him again. 

As for Jim, they’d catch him if they could, but most likely they’d just kill him too. He was valuable and unique; a lot of money and resources had gone into making him into the dangerous weapon he’d become. But he was rogue, now. He knew too much, had access to too much evidence, had knowledge of things they could never afford for the public to hear about. He was pretty much an unexploded bomb himself, but they’d make sure he was detonated far, far away from the public eye. 

Finally exhausted, Jim had left Blair sleeping and, lacking any notion of where they’d go from here, had stumbled out of the room to find a modicum of rest in the old armchair. He waited there now, for Blair. It was time to bring this thing to an end. 

*

Blair woke startled, with dim, distant memories of a long and terrifying nightmare. A soft voice coming at him from a room so dark he thought he’d gone blind. Sounds he couldn’t fathom. Instructions, orders, suggestions. Kindness followed by cruelty, followed by kindness. Like a half-forgotten memory - of something that happened to him many years ago, a thing too terrible to be recalled, a memory that must always be kept locked away in a forgotten room, like Bluebeard’s murdered wives. 

He was sweaty, dirty, feeble, exhausted. And so thirsty, his mouth tasted bad, like he’d been smoking, but he gave that up… how long ago? A long time. Years. Wasn’t it? He didn’t know. He was confused. He’d lost all sense of time. His stomach growled. How long since he’d eaten? Had he been ill? How long had he been lying in bed like this? Hours? Days? Weeks? _Years_? 

He was lying on his back on a firm but comfortable bed, still in Crispin Noir’s clothes and covered with an old patchwork quilt. He looked up, at the log ceiling of a cabin. He tried to sit up, crying out with the shock of sudden pain from his knee, and not only his knee; every inch of his body hurt. He lifted his hands to find out why they ached so, and was horrified to see how swollen, how black and blue they were, the red, raw stripes about his wrists, the blood on the sheets, that showed he’d been tied up until very recently. 

And then he remembered. 

Jim. 

Where was Jim? 

There were hypodermics and bloodied tissues on the nightstand, medical supplies and fresh needles, still in their seals, on the chest of drawers. The room reeked of surgical alcohol and body fluids. He lurched up onto unsteady feet. The room was cold, the floor beneath his naked feet colder still. He grabbed the quilt from the bed, wrapped it around himself, then staggered to the door, hoping to find a bathroom and a faucet, he needed some water. 

The door opened into another room where he found Jim waiting for him, not with a gag and a syringe, but sitting calmly in an armchair, his right hand handcuffed to pipes on the wall behind him. 

Blair stopped, confused. He glanced about him. The room was small and sparsely furnished. There was nowhere for an assailant to hide, and Jim wasn’t panicking or afraid. Jim didn’t speak. He sat, calmly waiting for Blair to come closer. Heart pounding, Blair stepped forward, gasping as his bare foot connected with something sharp. He looked down, stepping back to see a bunch of keys: the keys to the cuffs Jim was wearing. Jim must have handcuffed himself to the wall then tossed them there, out of reach. 

*

Jim watched as Blair glanced around the room, clutching the blanket round himself like it was the only thing that could protect him. He was tense and still, too scared to move.

Not too frightened to speak, though. No matter what had happened to him, no matter what Jim had done to him, if would take a lot more to rob him of that. Even in the midst of his terror, it had been an enormous effort for Blair to keep quiet, and right now was no exception.  

“This is a trick, right?” Blair demanded, his voice shaking. “You’re trying to catch me out again.” 

“No trick,” Jim asserted. “You’ve nothing to be afraid of. I won’t hurt you.” 

Blair’s eyes drifted over to Jim’s hand, where it hung on the cuff from the pipe, and glanced down at the keys by his foot before fixing his gaze back on Jim.  “You’ve got another key in your pocket, right?” He asked. “Man, I’m not that dumb.” 

Jim shook his head. “You’ve got the only set. I can’t get free,” he rattled the cuff pointedly, “unless you set me free. And you don’t need to do that, not until you believe you’re safe.” At Blair’s distrustful look, he added, “No rush. Take your time. But I promise, I won’t harm you.” 

Blair looked distrustful, but apparently decided to play along. And curiosity had clearly gotten the better of him. Still pale and shaky after the ordeal he’d been through, he whispered, “What did you do to me?” 

“I broke your conditioning.” The truth was brutal, no way to soften it. “You’ve spent years doing what they made you do. I’ve gotten rid of the compulsions, the triggers, all of it.” 

“I don’t understand,” Blair whispered. He swallowed, Jim’s words and his own memory meshing in his mind, the horrific nature of what Jim was telling him answering questions he hadn’t even known he’d had. “There was something in my back,” he said, making connections. “What was it? You cut it out.” 

“A microchip,” Jim answered. “A tracker.” He indicated a faint scar on his neck. “I had one too. I got rid of it as soon as I escaped.” 

“Escaped?” 

Jim nodded. “I wasn’t working for Uncle Sam the past ten years of my own free will, that’s for sure,” he said. 

“I didn’t know.” Blair looked close to tears. “About where you were, what they were making you do; about that thing they put in me. They told me… they told me if I did what I was told, and gave them what they wanted, you’d be safe.” 

“I know,” Jim said easily. “It’s okay.” 

“Man,” Blair said, shaking his head as though waking from sleep. “I believed it. How could I believe it? Of course you wouldn’t be safe!” He took a few moments, getting his breathing under control, then looked at Jim. “This ‘conditioning’,” he asked. “What did it make me do?” 

“It kept you where they wanted you. Compliant, easy to manipulate. It made you paranoid. Made you think they were watching your every move. It made you believe they could hear your thoughts, to a degree, although you’d pretty much overturned that one on your own.” 

Blair’s reaction held no surprise, the memory was still there, even if the compulsions had gone. “Why?” Blair demanded. “Why did they do that to me?” 

Jim shrugged. “Because they knew I’d come for you, if I ever got free of them. You were bait for their trap. When they didn’t catch me and I took you on the run instead, they went to Plan B, and turned you into a weapon to kill me with.” As he spoke, he could see light dawning in Blair’s eyes. “You remember, don’t you? Something set you off, some trigger words. You attacked me. Nothing could stop you, even when I kicked you in the leg.” 

“It feels like a bad dream,” Blair said, his voice low, remembering now. "It was real though, wasn't it? All of it." There was a single wooden chair over by the wall, and Blair hobbled over to sit on it, looking pale, shaky. As he sat down his eyes drifted to Jim’s forearm, wrapped in a bandage from elbow to wrist, covering the deep cuts Blair had managed to inflict. “Back there. In there,” Blair nodded vaguely toward the bedroom, “It was dark, and there was your voice, and I couldn’t get to you. I needed to get to you and finish it. I needed to kill you, Jim. I felt it so _bad_ …” 

“You could do it now, if you wanted to,” Jim pointed out. “I’m at your mercy, Chief. My good hand is cuffed, and my free hand is all sliced up.” Time to put his work to the test. “Martin. Theophillus. Scott,” he enunciated slowly, deliberately. 

Blair just blinked in confusion. “What?” he asked. 

“Trust goes both ways,” Jim pointed out, relieved the deprogramming had worked. He trusted himself and had faith in his methods, but there was always going to be some element of doubt. “I trust you. You’re not going to react to that trigger any longer. I deliberately put myself in this vulnerable position because I trust you, Blair. Believe me, I don’t make a habit of it.” 

Blair’s gaze travelled round the room. The place was stark, with no trappings of comfort other than an old broken stove, a scarred wooden table, this chair, the armchair Jim was sitting in, and the hard bed in the other room. “Why did you do all that stuff to me?” he asked eventually. “Tying me up, locking me in the trunk. Hurting me, scaring me half to death. If you were trying to help me, man, bringing me here so you could fix whatever they did to my head, you didn’t have to treat me like that on the way.” 

Time for the truth. “Like I told you, back in that motel, I thought you betrayed me.” 

“So you brought me here to punish me,” Blair deduced, his deep, quiet voice stirring the silence as though it belonged there, in its natural element. Blair was no wuss; not made to buckle under the constraints of enforced silence, this man. “Didn’t you?” he asked. 

“Yes,” Jim said. 

“How?” 

Jim shrugged. He wasn’t proud of it, but the truth needed to be told. “I was going to push you hard. Make you suffer, like I suffered. Sleep deprivation, physical exertion. I needed you to know what it was like for me. The training they put me through, the pain, the humiliation.” 

“Like some kind of twisted boot camp, huh.” Blair breathed harshly for a minute, looking away, as though he couldn’t believe what he was hearing, then fixed his gaze back on Jim. “So you worked it out. That I wasn’t your enemy. And you changed your mind. ”  
  
Jim nodded. 

“When you were done, what were you going to do? Were you gonna kill me?” 

Jim shook his head. “I don’t know. Probably. I hadn’t thought it through that far, strange as it sounds.”

Sandburg nodded back, lips tight with unhappiness. His gaze roamed round the room once more before coming back to rest on Jim. “Why?” he asked. “If you hated me that much, if you were that angry with me, why not just kill me right at the start and be done with it? Why go to all this trouble?”  
  
Jim had no answer that he thought Blair would care to hear, so he stayed silent.  
  
But Blair had already figured it out. “You wanted me to suffer. You said it yourself, man. You were looking for revenge, for satisfaction. All the years I knew you, living together, back in Cascade, back when you were a cop, you were tough, sure. A little unforgiving maybe. But you were never cruel, man. Not to me, not to anyone. You made sure the bad guys got what they deserved, but you never hurt anyone on purpose because you wanted _revenge_.” Anger rose to the surface. “You scared the hell out of me! You hurt me. You hurt me really bad. All those years when I was working at the U, living that shit life in that little room, thinking, if I stepped even an inch out of line that they were going to hurt Naomi, or hurt you, or kill me. In all those years, Jim, I was never as terrified as I have been these past days with you. Don’t do that again, Jim, I mean it. Don’t _ever_ do that again. _Man_! You _asshole_!”  
  
Jim held his peace. Sandburg’s tense stillness infused him like it was his as well, a shared vibe, both trapped in this time and place like flies in amber. The sense of being at the edge of the cliff; on the verge of some great revelation.  
  
“Why, Jim?” Blair asked, disturbing the silence once more. “Why did you do that to me? What happened to turn you into someone who could do this? What did they do to _you_?”  
  
Jim smiled. The familiar horror and shame coiled in his gut: it was his constant companion. “Same things they did to you,” he said softly.  
  
Sandburg shuddered, like electricity passing through his body - and Christ, they both knew what that felt like, only too well. “They tortured you.”  
  
Jim nodded, the simple gesture denying the awfulness of what he was admitting. “Yeah, but not just that. They did a lot more than that. They broke me, Chief. They made me do things, terrible things, and I did what I was told. How do you think I knew how to remove your conditioning? I’ve learned things, done things you can’t even imagine. The worst of it is, the conditioning didn’t take with me. Maybe because of the senses, I don't know. But I still did what I was told, because they gave me no choice. And I found that I was good at my job, better than anyone. I learned all they taught me, and then some. I’m not the same person from way back when. What I’ve become... I’m not anyone you want to know. Not anymore.” 

“But you said it man, they made you do it,” Blair said, and Jim loved him in that moment. After everything that he'd put him through, Blair was somehow willing to absolve him of sole responsibility for his crimes. 

Jim took in a deep breath, suddenly shaky. He felt weak and vulnerable; something tied up with this letting go, maybe. Catharsis. It was a feeling he’d not indulged for a very long time but, perhaps, he could finally give it its head, in this quiet moment, the eye of the storm. “I’m sorry,” he said, pouring every ounce of the guilt, pain and regret he felt into his words. “I’m sorry that I did this to you, Blair. I’m really screwed up in the head, but that’s no excuse. I won’t ask for your forgiveness, because I don’t deserve it. But for what it’s worth, I’m sorry, and I swear to you I will never hurt you again, or allow anyone else to hurt you, so long as I’m alive to prevent it.” 

In answer, Blair just closed his eyes. He sat silently for a while, not looking at Jim, his breathing harsh, but gradually slowing to something more like normal. 

Eventually, as Jim watched, Blair stood, then leaned down and picked up the keyring from the floor, the two silver keys dangling from his fingers. He weighed it in his hand a moment, then looked at Jim and nodded, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallowed. Then he decisively swung his arm, and tossed the keys at Jim with a pitcher’s precision. 

Jim caught them with his free hand, his eyes on Sandburg all the while. Blair looked somehow magnificent in that moment. Pale and shaky, his eyes bruised dark with fatigue and misery, unshaven and his hair a wild, grey halo around his head. But unbent and unbroken, despite it all, and somehow finding the strength to put aside his fear, despite everything Jim had done to him. 

Jim just wished he had the same strength. 

After another silent moment, during which neither of them moved or spoke, Jim unlocked the cuff and pushed himself up from the chair, rolling his shoulder as he stood to ease the stiffness of joints held too long in one position. Blair watched him all the while, unafraid, unflinching. 

Drawn inexorably across the room, Jim moved over to stand before Blair. He felt somehow as though he should fall to his knees, like a penitent, but instead he stayed on his feet, accepting all, asking nothing. 

Blair’s eyes never left Jim’s face, his expression unfathomable. Then a hand reached out from under the blanket he was wearing like a cloak and, feather-like, skimmed tenderly across Jim’s unshaven cheek, the touch like a benediction. 

Jim never knew who moved first, but in the next moment they were wrapped in each other’s arms, holding to each other as if they’d never let go. 

*

After everything that he’d been through, after listening to Jim’s revelations, Blair should have been enraged; should have been afraid. But instead here he was, crawling naked all over Jim in bed. 

Beneath him, Jim continuously cried out as though he was in agony, but Blair had already deduced that it was an excess of pleasure he was struggling to deal with, not pain. 

“Dial it down, man,” he ordered, somewhat ruthlessly, before taking Jim’s big, glistening cock back into his mouth. 

He was totally fucked in the head, Blair acknowledged as he enthusiastically suckled on Jim. Figuratively and (he wryly noted, taking into account his current activity) literally. They both were. There was no way this was healthy; no way this could ever be anything other than a total disaster. As relationships went, assuming you could even call this a relationship, theirs was absolutely as dysfunctional as it was possible to get. 

Beneath him, Jim was already losing it. His hips were pumping now, rhythmically, spasmodically, despite Blair’s hands holding him in place with bruising strength. When he came a few seconds later it was with a strangled wail, the sound ripped from his depths as bitter liquid flooded Blair’s mouth. 

Blair didn’t pull off, not right away, even though he knew Jim’s cock was probably too sensitive in the aftermath. There was something dark at work inside Blair as he listened to the pained little gasps Jim made. He wanted to hear that; wanted Jim to do it even more, feeling in control of _something_ for the first time in an eternity, needing desperately to hold onto that control. So he kept on sucking and tonguing, doing it more aggressively every time Jim squirmed and his deflating dick twitched in his mouth, holding Jim down and doing it harder, until he realized suddenly that Jim’s whole body was shaking, the gasps sounding wetter and more desperate. 

Blair stopped and looked up. Jim could have pushed Blair off him at any time; he could have broken him in two with nothing more than his bare hands. Instead, he was _crying_. 

“Oh God,” Blair whispered, instantly backing off and kneeling up. He would have climbed off the bed and fled the room, he was so utterly appalled, but Jim held out his arms to Blair, and Blair could no more resist the expression of utter desperation on Jim’s face than he could walk away from this whole fucked-up scenario.  

He scooted up the bed so that he was sitting beside Jim, his back against the headboard, and pulled the other man to him. Jim rolled onto his side, his head coming to rest against Blair’s stomach, arms coming around Blair’s hips, hard, painful sobs convulsing his body. Blair couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. All he could do was hold on. 

After a while, Jim calmed down and stopped crying. But he stayed where he was, and Blair had no inclination to move. Instead he studied Jim’s bare back, the expanse of it easily visible to him from this angle, the faded white and pink scars of beatings and what looked like burns obvious on every inch of Jim’s skin. It made his throat ache with sorrow and the same deep, dark anger that had inspired his slightly sadistic behavior. So much to take in, so much he still didn’t know. 

Blair’s own libido had taken a hike, guilt-ridden and messed-up and angry as he was, but it sat up once more and took notice when Jim finally moved to sit beside him and turned to look at him. Jim didn’t speak, just gazed at Blair for a moment before putting out a hand and tenderly palming Blair’s cheek. 

Blair was pretty proud of himself for not flinching. He knew what those hands could do, had felt it firsthand. But another part of him knew, knew with a deep conviction, that it would never happen again. 

It wouldn’t. It absolutely wouldn’t. Hell, _no_. 

Blair reached out to Jim too and they moved in concert, sliding down so that they were lying together, stretched out on their sides facing each other. Their mouths came together, their bodies too, and Blair could feel that both of them were hard, hard for each other. 

Jim had not forgotten how to kiss, he’d always kissed like you were his entire world, and lack of opportunity over the past ten years had clearly not changed that one bit. Blair felt subsumed, enveloped, enfolded. He was barely aware, dazed and breathless as he soon became, of Jim maneuvering him to lie on his back and moving down, down, _down_ to explore Blair’s secret places, the places no one else had touched like this, not for ten years, not since Jim had touched him last, an eternity ago in another world when their innocence had been so complete and so terrible. 

It only took that single moment of touching, of mouthing, of tender manipulation, and Blair lost it, his mind blanking out on the pleasure, the rapid ecstasy of it sharply poignant, like grief. 

Blair had no energy in the aftermath for post-coital niceties. He slid instantly and inexorably toward sleep, so utterly exhausted he couldn’t have moved from that spot if their lives depended on it. He was barely aware of Jim covering them both, before sliding his arms around him and holding him close. 


	9. Chapter 9

Unable to read another word Blair slammed the laptop closed, fingernails tapping out his tension on the tabletop, trying to calm the crazy beating of his heart and failing. 

He leapt to his feet and paced the room as fast as his injured knee would allow. He’d been a mass of rage and nervous energy since Jim had eased his tired body out of their bed that morning, as he prepared to leave the cabin for the first time in days. To leave the cabin; to leave Blair. It was the first time they’d been apart since they’d arrived here several days ago. 

There was no way to stay in touch. They’d agreed never to use cellphones again, not even in an emergency. To do so could lead their enemies to their location in a heartbeat. 

Fear for Jim, away from the safety of the well-protected cabin, and rage at what had been done to them both, infused Blair with the kind of energy he hadn’t felt in years as he paced the tiny cabin room, back and forth, over and over, trying to work out his anger, trying to work up solutions to their seemingly impossible plight. He still felt a lot of anger toward Jim too; how could he not? And Jim, _man_ he had turned into guilt central. But they were working through it, they _had_ to. It was all completely crazy and dysfunctional but, the simple fact was, they _needed_ each other. 

The sight of the many new and awful scars, the stark tattoo and other signs of incarceration and torture Blair had discovered on Jim’s naked body, spoke of a decade of abuse worse even than his own. Now the full story, revealed in horrifying, halting confessions in each other’s arms and throughout the documents and files on Jim’s computer had Blair in a rage, pacing and muttering in a rapid-fire debate with himself as he worked through ideas, trying to come up with a plan to defeat their adversaries and save themselves. Jim had left the files for Blair to read, to catch up on all that had been concealed, the full, sordid detail of Jim’s own, secret story. It was an account of nothing less than psychological warfare, used to manipulate and keep people in-line; extreme methods of conditioning, advanced methods of interrogation. The whole thing made Blair’s blood run cold with horror. 

Defeating them was a near impossible task. The people they were fighting had almost unimaginable power and resources. Blair had been a betting man all his life, but he couldn’t begin to calculate the odds of going up against these faceless men and winning. Coming out of this alive and free was going to be the hardest thing either of them had ever done, if it was even possible at all. 

“Goddamn it!” he ground out through clenched teeth, for perhaps the hundredth time that day. “Fucking assholes!” 

*

It was only when he walked back in the door of the cabin that Jim felt he could relax. Leaving Blair here alone while he went to collect what they needed had been a wrench, Jim’s imagination very well capable of supplying him with every nightmare scenario possible. What if Blair had been found while he’d been gone? What if he’d been captured, hurt, killed? What if, what if? 

But long years of practice had kept Jim focused on what needed to be done, his own fears buried and subsumed under a carefully bland persona, someone who would not be readily noticed or remembered by those he came in contact with. He’d collected the items that’d been delivered for them to a post office fifty miles away (under a different name, of course), and visited a couple of stores in a city forty miles beyond that to get the rest of the stuff they needed. A contact from his old life who he trusted - he would not say who or from where just yet, not even to Blair – had provided them with documents that would allow them to become different people, with different names. And right now, walking in the door to Blair’s frenetic pacing and ranting monologue (which he’d been listening to from several miles up the road), the process of adopting those identities would begin. 

Jim was no sooner in the door than Blair was on him, his hands gripping Jim hard as he kissed him with all the same desperation that Jim himself felt, and returned in kind. What they felt for each other was far too complex to be called love, the demanding physicality they frequently engaged in having a heartbreaking edge to it, a sense of desperation as if each hungry touch might be their last. 

If the powers-that-be got hold of them, it most certainly would be. 

The hard kiss ended abruptly. “You got the stuff, man?” Blair demanded. 

“Yeah.” Jim reached out a hand, brushed Blair’s grey, curly cascade of hair. “I’m going to miss this,” he said, a little regretfully. 

“I won’t.” The categoric rebuttal was a million miles away from the young man Jim had once known who had vowed never to cut his hair. “Let’s get to it. I need to talk to you, man, and I need you to listen. We can do it while you sort my hair out.” 

The next hour was spent cutting Blair’s hair short, but not too short, then dying it a nondescript mousey brown that would blend into the crowd. They had to become anonymous, the kind of men who would pass unremarked and quickly forgotten. Blair talked expansively while the dye was on, disgusted and horrified by the things he’d learned from the documents Jim had shown him. “Jim, if the U.N. got hold of those files, everything would change. You know that, right? The whole thing is just… God, I don’t even have words to tell you what I think. It’s just, it makes me so _angry_ , you know? I can’t stop thinking about it. Something has _got_ to be done…” He shut up only briefly when he got into the shower to rinse the dye out. 

Blair continued to rant and rage as he tried on the cheap suit, white shirt and dull tie Jim had bought for him, hands punctuating the points he made in a way so reminiscent of how he’d once been. Like Jim, Blair was a different man now, and that small reminder of his former youthful exuberance was an inexpressible comfort. He sat down again in front of the mirror so that Jim could finish tidying up his haircut; it had to be neat, to speak of a man who could afford a reasonable barber (another skill Jim had acquired, the ability to transform someone’s appearance to something utterly authentic in a heartbeat). Blair’s voice droned on and on, so soothing, so familiar, despite their years apart. Jim was so tired these days, so weary of it all, if he could just listen to Blair’s voice forever and never have to worry about anything else, ever again, that was all he really wanted… 

“Hey! Are you listening to me?” Jim was jerked out of what his reverie abruptly. Blair’s reflection was frowning at him in the mirror. “Did you zone?” 

Jim realized that, in fact, he had. “I’m sorry, Chief. I guess I’m a little tired.” Jesus, he hadn’t zoned in years. It was something he never did, not anymore. He got back into action, neatly trimming a few stray wisps of hair over Blair’s ear. “What were you saying?” 

“I said, we need to go public with this stuff, Jim. And that’s what we’re gonna do.” 

Jim felt exhausted at the very thought. “Let’s just stick to the plan, huh? We’ll leave the country, start over.” He reached out a hand to tenderly brush Blair’s face, wanting nothing more than the two of them to be safe somewhere, where they wouldn’t have to think about this stuff anymore. “You’re not thinking clearly, Chief. This is your anger talking.” 

Blair batted his hand away like he was an annoying fly. “Cut it out, man, and listen to what I’m saying. This is the clearest I’ve thought in _years_. I’ve gotten it all worked out. How far is Atlanta from here? A day’s drive?” 

Jim nodded. “Yeah, I guess.” 

“So, we go there to CNN. You remember Wendy Hawthorne, the reporter who filmed us for True Crime? She’s a primetime reporter there now. We contact her, offer her an exclusive. We give her copies of the files, and we do an interview, an exposé.” 

“ _We_?” Jim asked. “Blair, you’re a wanted man. You can’t show your face on TV. That’d make this,” Jim flicked at Blair’s now neatly trimmed, mousey brown hair, “pointless.” 

“Okay, _you_. _You_ go on TV.” Blair’s reflection squinted up at him, his head on one side. Jim looked at his own reflection standing over Blair; knew that he could see what Blair could see: lank hair (so grey, iron grey). An emerging beard, tired eyes, the age showing in his face. 

“Wear loose clothing,” Blair told him, after a few seconds of scrutiny. “Cover those damn muscles, grow the beard out, dye your hair. No will recognize you afterward.” 

“Blair, I just…” Jim sighed, his heart sinking. “I just… I want my life back.” It was all too much, he was too exhausted, his profound longing for peace and safety for both of them was all he could think about, every minute of every day. “I just want it to be over.” He felt like he’d used up all his anger, all his rage already. He was worn out, at the end of his endurance. 

Blair got up and turned to face Jim, gripping him by the arms. “Jim,” he said earnestly, “if we just leave, no one will ever know what happened. I need them to know what happened. I _need_ them to.” His voice, his grip, gentled. “Otherwise it will _never_ be over. We’ll never be safe, and they’ll do the same thing to others. If we leave without making it public, we’ll have to live with the fact we had the chance to stop them, but let it go.” He shook Jim a little. “I can’t do that, Jim. And I _won’t_.” 

Jim already knew he had lost. It was certainly the case, given all that they’d gone through, that he could deny Blair nothing. 

Blair, it seemed, could sense his capitulation without words needing to be said. He smiled, a little sadly, and changed the topic. “Did you get the contacts?” 

“Right here.” Jim retrieved a small pot he’d gotten from a drugstore on special order, and handed it over to Blair. “You’d better start wearing them; get used to them,” he said. 

Blair investigated the contents, and carefully slid the two colored lenses into his eyes. Then he went to stand beside Jim. The two of them regarded themselves the mirror. 

A tall, careworn, grey-haired man and a shorter, brown-eyed stranger in a cheap suit looked back at them. “You look pretty different, Chief,” Jim said, a lump in his throat. He turned to look into unfamiliar dark eyes, set in Blair’s familiar, beautiful face. 

Blair looked up at him wistfully, his hand reaching out to grasp Jim’s. “Nothing stays the same for ever,” he said. “We’ve just got to make the best of it, man.”


	10. Chapter 10

They drove south west in a light blue Toyota Camry, the most unexceptional car Jim could find at the rental. 

They kept to the main highway, keeping their speed just under the limit: two anonymous men in their anonymous car, heading who cares where. They didn’t take rest stops, they couldn’t take the risk of being spotted on a camera, not when they were so close to freedom. 

They listened to the news as they drove. The long-running Chilean Miners’ story had finally been overtaken in the top slot by the leak of four hundred thousand documents about the Afghan and Iraq wars. Wikileaks had given secret documents to various media organizations, the US Department of Defense were saying it was the largest leak of classified documents in its history. The State Department claimed the documents put military operations at risk. The Wikileaks site had been subjected to a denial of service attack; someone had tried, succeeded, in shutting them down, but too late, the news was already out, having been pre-distributed to a dozen different news organizations. Swedish authorities had issued an arrest warrant for the Wikileaks founder, a guy called Julian Assange, on sexual assault charges. 

“Sexual assault?” Blair said. 

“Pretty convenient, huh?” Jim said. 

“Are they serious? No one’s going to believe that!” 

Jim shrugged. “And you didn’t murder that security guard, but look what happened to you.” He reached out, grasped Blair’s hand. “No one has to believe it. It’s enough to arrest him and that’s all they need. ” 

The bulletin moved on to news of further tensions between North and South Korea, and the death of Leslie Nielsen. Blair reached over and turned the radio off. He was quiet for a long time. Jim found it unnerving. Blair had been on a high since they left Atlanta; he’d hardly taken a breath for the last two hundred and sixty miles. 

“Seems we aren’t the first to break news today,” Blair said, finally, staring out of his window at the road. “This Wikileaks stuff isn’t as up close and personal as your interview with Wendy, but it’s pretty hot stuff. Do you really think Wendy Hawthorne is going to keep her word now, when this stuff is breaking all over? I mean, this is a pretty big story we’re asking her to sit on.” 

Jim cast a quick glance at his partner, his friend. Blair was looking at him now, wide-eyed with hope and those weird brown eyes he could not get used to. Jim blew out a sigh. “Honestly Chief? I don’t know. Once upon a time I’d have said, no chance. ‘Lady wasn’t exactly known for her integrity, but now... she got the job at CNN, she cleaned up her act. We’re her sources. She knows how important it is to us that this not break ‘til we’re out of the country.” 

“She’s pretty famous now, I guess. She has a lot to lose if this goes wrong for her.” 

“She only has to wait 48 hours. I think I trust her to do that. I’d have known if she was lying, in any case.” 

“And if we go down, she loses everything, right? Our laptops, all the evidence you amassed. They’re sure to raid CNN, they’ll take it all.” 

“And arrest her too.” 

“You think?” 

“But they’ll do that anyway. They’re chasing this Wikileaks guy with an arrest warrant, but they can’t silence the story.” 

“Because the story’s already out. Does she know they’ll probably arrest her?” 

“Knowing Wendy Hawthorne as we both do, I feel sure she thinks doing a little time is well worth the publicity and the boost to her career.” 

Blair nodded spasmodically, nervously, white knuckles gripping his seatbelt, staring out at the road beyond his window. “We’re doing the right thing, aren’t we Jim? Going to the media, I mean, telling it all, making them record it and sit on it; making them wait?” 

“You were the one who wanted this, Chief.” 

“I know. I know. I just… I couldn’t let them get away with it, Jim. Scot free, you know? People have to know what happened to us and, who knows how many like us? We have to at least try to stop them from doing this again.” 

Jim checked his mirror, pulled into the middle lane, overtaking the slow truck ahead, then easing back on his speed, setting a steady pace, unnoticed by the police and anyone else who might be watching. Jim knew what they’d done wouldn’t help others like them, any more than it would prevent it happening again. The faceless men who had done this to them would still sit safe in their smoke-filled rooms. What he and Blair had done by taking their story to CNN would make things a little hotter for those anonymous powers behind many thrones, but it wouldn’t make the world safer for them and would ultimately do nothing to the powerful men behind their abductions. But it surely did feel good and he had no regrets about taking Blair’s lead and sticking it to the man, just a little. 

“This is our turnoff. Almost there now, Chief,” he said. 

Blair nodded, but couldn’t force a smile. He couldn’t quite believe this had all gone as smoothly, or as easily as it seemed. He was still half expecting a truck to suddenly block their road, for the men in dark suits and dark glasses to appear, for a bullet in the back. He reached for Jim’s right hand and held on tight. 

Jim grinned: that old familiar, big Jim smile. “If this has to end like a movie, Chief, I’d rather be in Rambo than Thelma or Louise.” 

Blair didn’t answer and he couldn’t laugh. He kept staring out of the window, into the backwoods pressing hard and dark against the road, and wondering, as he often did these days, how many bodies were buried out there, where no one would ever find them. 

*

Harry Pontcarré – not his real name – was an old buddy of Jim’s. An army vet turned longhaired, anti-establishment, neo-hippie punk, who smelled strongly of his own homegrown weed, and who just happened to own a private ‘airfield’ – a well-hidden grass strip with no permissions - and an ageing, but working plane that he used to fly his crop out. The plane now belonged to Jim, Harry transferred ownership when he sent Jim the fake IDs a few days back, on receipt of a very large sum of money Jim had had transferred to Harry’s offshore account. It was a big chunk out of Jim’s savings but, where they were heading, a few American dollars went a very long way. 

Jim and Harry walked into a hug; a big, back-slapping embrace. 

“Good to see you again Jim, love the threads,” Harry laughed, standing back to admire Jim’s cheap polyester suit. “Good to meet you too, Blair,” he said, shaking Blair’s hand. “Seen your picture on the TV. Jim did a good job there. Even your mother wouldn’t recognize you now.” 

Blair tried, and failed, to force a smile. The pain of enforced estrangement from his mother and her subsequent death in a faraway place never went away. Plus, trust came hard, and he didn’t know this guy, despite Jim’s apparent camaraderie with him. 

Harry nodded. “Nervous huh? Sure you are, who wouldn’t be? But she’ll get you there if anyone will.” He rapped the side of the old plane. “She’s all fuelled and ready to go, Skip,” he said, saluting Jim. “Here's the flight plan you asked for." He handed Jim an envelope. "I’m guessing you two don’t want to be wasting any more time jawing with an old army codger.” 

“Thanks Harry,” Jim said. “It’s a big thing you’re doing. Don’t think I don’t know that.” 

“What you talking about, Jim? You paid me well enough for the privilege, you big goof.” Jim reached for his hand, but Harry slapped it away and grabbed Jim in a hug again. “You take care now,” he said. “You keep a good distance ‘tween yourself and them sonsabitches. Don’t make me regret selling Celia to you, she’s been good to me.” He pushed Jim away. Sniffing wetly, looking a little tearful, he said. “Love that plane more than I ever loved any woman. You go on, get on your way, get outta here 'fore I change my mind.” 

Jim raised a hand in farewell, then took Blair by the arm and steered him to the plane. “Come on Chief,” he said. “Time to go.” 

They climbed into the cockpit. Celia smelled strongly of burned plastic, old coffee, kerosene and weed. Blair looked out of the misted window at Harry who was standing by his cabin, waving goodbye with both hands - more than a little stoned, he thought. “Will he be okay? What if the guys who are looking for us find him?” 

“He won’t be here. Harry’s retiring, bought himself a nice little place in Costa Rica.”

Blair looked again at the oily, bearded man on the tarmac. “How’d he afford that, Jim? What did he mean, you paid well enough for the privilege?” 

“What do I need money for, Blair? Money wouldn’t help either of us where we were headed if I hadn’t paid for Harry’s help.” 

“Can he be trusted, Jim?” 

“I’d know if he couldn’t,” Jim said confidently, another oblique reference to the acuteness of his senses these days. Blair didn’t like to imagine what might have happened to Harry if Jim had discovered otherwise. “And, he doesn’t know where we’re going.” Jim tossed Harry's envelope into the back of the cockpit and pulled a chart from his backpack - the only luggage either of them had, there was little from their old lives that either of them were going to need. “I drew up my own flight plan. Can you read an aeronautical chart, Chief?” 

Blair gawped at him. “No.” 

“Then it’s a good job I can.” 

“I guess you learned all this stuff in your black ops days, right?” 

Jim grinned as he flipped some switches and the propellers roared to life, shaking the fuselage, filling the air with a powerful smell of engine fuel. 

“I feel like I'm in Casablanca here. Jim, this is some old plane, is it safe?” 

“I doubt it.” 

The little plane rattled and shook alarmingly as Jim began the long bump and roll toward Harry’s homemade runway. 

“Jim, is this really going to work? Are we really going to get away with this?” 

“I have no idea, Chief. But it’s going to be fun finding out.” 

“It _is_?” 

Jim laughed. “Gotta be better than the alternative.” Jim turned the plane as they reached the start of the runway, and powered up the engines. The plane juddered alarmingly, but Jim looked happier than he’d looked for a long time. “We’re ready for takeoff. Do you want me to turn back?” 

“No.” Blair felt a smile growing on his face. The first time he’d smiled in…. well, he really didn’t know how long. 

“Sure?” Jim shouted over the engine noise. 

“Certain.” 

Jim’s face broke into a grin. He released the brakes. The plane accelerated fast, powerful now, no longer juddering, faster, faster. 

“So, where _are_ we going?” Blair had to shout too, the engines and the deep rumble of wheels speeding along on the tarmac deafening in the tiny cockpit. “It better be somewhere warm.” 

Jim glanced at his chart. “I’m thinking, somewhere not too far away, because I’m not sure how good Celia will be for a long-haul. Somewhere remote, with a lot of unexplored jungle and no extradition treaty with the US.” 

“So you’re going to keep me guessing.” 

Jim grinned again. “Don’t you trust me?” 

“I trust you, Jim.”   

“So, are you ready for takeoff, Thelma?” The runway petered out just as Jim pulled full-back on the throttle. The plane tilted and lifted, heading for their future. 

Blair grinned, feeling the horrors they’d lived through slough off him as the plane rose in the sky, like shedding a worn, ill-fitting skin. “I guess so, Louise.” 

 

The End


End file.
